Expert Spotlight Kathy Tuchman Glass Your new books share the common title (Re)designing Writing Units. What does this mean? The books are meant to empower teachers—or those who create curriculum—to design new units of study or redesign existing units. Although mostly positioned for grades 5–12, elementary teachers can also benefit from the books by adapting what they read. When educators finish the books, it is my hope that they have a writing unit ready to pilot.
What challenges will these books help educators solve? Often teachers are handed a textbook or a planned curriculum that they are mandated to use, and they dutifully do so. I’m invested in increasing teachers’ professionalism and building their capacity around the teaching of writing and all it entails. I provide practical and concrete suggestions, examples, and templates galore for instruction, various writing skills, and all forms of assessment, plus tools such as rubrics and checklists. These books will not only boost teachers’ professionalism but unleash their creativity as well.
What makes your new books unique in this content area? Many books feature one or more of these curricular and instruction aspects: backward-planning approach, lesson-planning models,
These books will not only boost teachers’ professionalism but unleash their creativity as well.”
instructional strategies, teaching methods, assessment, writing tasks, and rubrics and checklists for assessing student work. Each of my books features the whole spectrum geared to a specific writing type and its genres, including the characteristic elements and structure. I begin by presenting readers with the wide-angle scope of developing or redesigning writing units using backward planning. Then I drill down to the lesson design stage,
explain what “gradual release of responsibility” means, and share a thorough example of a lesson that readers can use in their classrooms. Additionally, since reading and writing are intrinsically linked, I share ways that teachers can lead instruction around complex text as a vehicle to help students become better writers.
What professional development do you offer to support these books? The customized support and guidance that I provide to educators is an extension of the work found in my books. Depending on a school’s or district’s goals, I can help educators: • Implement interactive instructional strategies for teaching writing skills • Define and devise various assessment tasks (pre-, formative, common, self-, summative) around teaching writing skills and using writing to demonstrate understanding of complex texts • Build rubrics and checklists that can be used as instructional tools • Devise lessons to meet students’ needs and boost their writing achievement • Use complex texts as a tool for teaching grammar and conventions
Order your copies of these books by Kathy Tuchman Glass.
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