These books supplied the strategies that became the core of my teaching method. Each one offers far more ideas than I mention here. I recommend them all.<\/p>\n
Further down, you\u2019ll find recommended books that take different approaches, which may help if your students need either more basic or more advanced instruction.<\/p>\n
Anderson teaches middle school. The key to his method is mentor sentences: showing students examples of great writing that illustrate the skills he wants them to learn. To teach editing, he involves students in conversations about what works well in a given passage and what doesn\u2019t. He tinkers with sentences in front of them\u2014moving things around, substituting a phrase or word\u2014and asks which version they prefer. The whole class works together, talking the problems through. He believes that students learn more from positive reinforcement than from error correction.<\/p>\n
Where I\u2019ve veered away from Anderson\u2019s methods\u2014for example, showing my classes more \u201cproblem sentences\u201d than inspiring examples\u2014it\u2019s because I\u2019m the last English teacher most of my students will ever have. I practice a form of emergency medicine: showing them how to cure their writing of the most common errors rather than challenging them to reach for loftier, more imaginative language. For college freshmen who still struggle to write and who won\u2019t be receiving further writing instruction, this seems a reasonable choice.<\/p>\n
These books are aimed at K-12 teachers, but they included one of the most useful teaching techniques I\u2019ve come across: the Art of the Sentence, in which students are asked to take a complex idea and express it in one carefully crafted sentence. I build this into every lesson plan, because it\u2019s the best way I\u2019ve found to let students practice polishing their writing. Lemov\u2019s books also include dozens of other teaching strategies I\u2019ve used with my classes.<\/p>\n
Many of Gallagher\u2019s teaching ideas parallel Anderson\u2019s. He uses mentor sentences to teach skills, and limits himself to teaching one key skill per week, which his students practice every day. Students analyze these mentor sentences, then emulate them repeatedly. He also writes and edits in front of them, and explains what he\u2019s doing as he goes. He believes that teachers need to give students both \u201csimulated and integrated practice,\u201d i.e., first they do an exercise, then they use the skill in writing of their own.<\/p>\n