Write Like This
Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts
Kelly GallagherIf you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers.
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- Author: Kelly Gallagher
- Year: 2011
- Grade Range: 4-12
- Media: 224 pp/paper
- ISBN: 978-157110-896-8
- Item No.: WEB-0896
If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers. Recognizing the importance that modeling plays in the learning process, high school English teacher Kelly Gallagher shares how he gets his students to stand next to and pay close attention to model writers, and how doing so elevates his students' writing abilities. Write Like This is built around a central premise: if students are to grow as writers, they need to read good writing, they need to study good writing, and, most important, they need to emulate good writers.
In Write Like This, Kelly emphasizes real-world writing purposes, the kind of writing he wants his students to be doing twenty years from now. Each chapter focuses on a specific discourse: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. In teaching these lessons, Kelly provides mentor texts (professional samples as well as models he has written in front of his students), student writing samples, and numerous assignments and strategies proven to elevate student writing.
By helping teachers bring effective modeling practices into their classrooms, Write Like This enables students to become better adolescent writers. More important, the practices found in this book will help our students develop the writing skills they will need to become adult writers in the real world.
Table of Contents
Preview this book online!Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Moving Writing to the Front Burner
Chapter 2: Express and Reflect
Chapter 3: Inform and Explain
Chapter 4: Evaluate and Judge
Chapter 5: Inquire and Explore
Chapter 6: Analyze and Interpret
Chapter 7: Take a Stand/Propose a Solution
Chapter 8: Polishing the Paper
Chapter 9: The Wizard of Oz Would Have Been a Lousy Writing Teacher
Appendices
Kelly Gallagher
Kelly, a "baseballoholic" and a self-described expert at negotiating airports, is also a teacher with 23 years of high school teaching experience behind him.
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