Teaching ELA in the 21st

What do young writers need?     Over the last couple years of teaching, I have reflected much on what young writers need to truly grow and develop. While my time as a preservice teacher in college was formative and fundamentally shaped much of my teaching philosophy, it was not until I was in a classroom regularly reading the writing of over one hundred students that I began to really question: how am I supposed to teach all of these students to become better writers? The beauty of teaching is that I will likely spend my entire career to exploring strategies for teaching writing, like this semester when I was fortunate to have my students partner with writing coaches who provided them with feedback and opportunities for revision on several writing tasks. In this section, I'll explore what I believe students need throughout their writing and revising processes and how the various roles intertwine.      From teachers, students need clear expectations for how a wri...

       Lately, I've been reminiscing on the telenovela I made when I was in high school for a Spanish project. For what felt like forever, the roughly 6-7 minute long video was posted publicly on YouTube by my classmate who recorded and edited it; but, tragically, I can either no longer recall the correct title of the video or their YouTube channel or they have deleted the channel or video. I hope to find the video one day, but for now I will include another example of a student created telenovela I found on YouTube in my search (although theirs is far better than mine). I was first reminded about this video because I planned to show my students how far I've come with learning Spanish, since sometimes students who are new to learning a language at my immersion school feel hesitant to begin speaking and learning a language when compared to peers who began learning their language in kindergarten. However, in connection to the work we have been doing in Currins 547 wit...

 How did we get here?     In today's world of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Generative AI galore, we are immersed in the wonder of "writing" that can be produced with the entering of a short prompt. When ChatGPT came onto the market in November 2022, I was about to begin my final semester of my bachelor's degree in Secondary English Education. As I entered my full time student teaching the following spring, students I had gotten to know first semester who had rarely turned in writing assignments began to turn in full length essays, always well-written but with an uncanny tendency to deviate from the expectations of the assignment that were explained and scaffolded in class.  Outside of the classroom, I saw many posts online about people experimenting with talking to AI chatbots; at the time, I imagined those chatbots like the robot pictured above: a cute, helpful friend who had a knack for writing. In the early days of seeing AI seep into the English classroom we began discus...