Call for Copy: Writing Out the Storm, Fall/Winter 2008: Deadline November 30, 2008

Call for Copy: Writing Out the Storm, Fall/Winter 2008

 
Unfortunately much education policy imitates weather fronts: here today, gone tomorrow, with perhaps some precipitation to feed the crops, but also some uprooted plants, some broken branches, left behind. In this current testing climate, how do we maintain a writing program that not only can withstand today’s unpredictable weather but also the climate challenges of the next century?

Testing has its benefits, telling us much about what our students need to work on, but it also has its drawbacks. Twice-yearly testing has taken instructional time out of our already jam-packed curricular schedules–up to two weeks in many schools, one week in the fall and one in the spring–and it has blocked out the schedules of many schools’ computer labs and/or libraries, sometimes for an additional week each testing period for make-up tests, rendering the lab or library unavailable for writing practice, for research projects, for more than a month. How do we as teachers of writing continue to produce lifelong writers no matter what the education climate is?

 

Some possible article topics include:

- Despite testing pressures, what have you been able to retain in your writing instruction? What have you had to give up? In what ways have you revised your writing instruction to fit the demands of your schedule?

- What are some new ways you have done more instruction with less time?

- How have you been able to incorporate the testing material into instruction that goes beyond the test?

- What are some writing projects/ activities that you have created to give your students a chance to really dig in and write about something they're really passionate about, either after taking the tests or during the stressful times of preparing for the tests?

InLand, as usual, accepts articles that are not precisely on the issue's theme as well as poetry or prose written by teachers of all grade levels.

Send articles to Crag Hill at

1111 E. Fifth St., or by e-mail at [email protected]

InLand’s blog: http://scorecard.typepad.com/inland/

 
InLand is a magazine that serves the interests of approximately 350 K-College Language Arts educators in Idaho and Eastern Washington. Our readers love articles that enlarge their understanding of a topic, as well as articles that equip them with strategies that can easily put into action in their classrooms.

 

Deadline

November 30, 2008