There are three truths about teaching writing, one that’s widely known, one that isn’t, and one that will change your teaching forever:
- the ability to write is essential for students in every subject area
- writing is the most powerful and efficient tool that teachers have for helping students connect with content and deepen their understanding of it
- every teacher, including you, is ready to coach middle and secondary writers successfully right now.
No matter what subject you teach, Content-Area Writing is for you, especially if you’re juggling broad curriculum mandates, thick textbooks, and severe time constraints. It not only shows that incorporating carefully structured writing activities into your lessons actually increases understanding and achievement, but also proves how writing can save, not consume, valuable instructional time.
Following up on Subjects Matter—the book that changed how tens of thousands of language arts, math, science, and social studies teachers use reading in their classrooms—Harvey Daniels, Steven Zemelman, and Nancy Steineke now present the most thorough and practical exploration available of writing in the subject areas. Content-Area Writing guides you strategically through the two major types of writing that every student must know:
- Writing to Learn: the quick, exploratory, and extemporaneous in-class writing that helps kids engage deeply with content, build connections, and retain what they’ve learned
- Public Writing: planned, constructed, and polished writing in which students demonstrate knowledge and reflect on what they’ve learned.
With their contagious combination of humor, irreverence, and classroom smarts, Daniels, Zemelman, and Steineke give you dozens of valuable lessons for encouraging growth in both types of writing with subject-specific ideas for planning, organizing, and teaching, as well as samples of student work and guidelines for evaluation and assessment. They also include detailed information on how their strategies fit into the writing process, how they can be used in writing workshops across the curriculum, and how they prepare students for testing and other on-demand writing situations.
With writing, you can help students learn better, retain more, meet content- and skills-based standards, and tackle any test with confidence. No matter what you teach, read Content-Area Writing and discover for yourself that classroom time spent writing is classroom time well spent.
