Narrative Writing

Book excerpt: Narrative Writing is winner of the Richard Meade Award, given by the National Council of Teacher's of English George Hillocks, Jr. is a master teacher who has had great success working with kids in the Chicago Public Schools for over thirty years. This book will show you why. -Michael W. Smith, author of "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys" Using instructional methods grounded in concrete, practical activity, Hillocks clearly outlines how to help students take the raw material of their experiences and transform it into engaging, well-wrought prose. A masterful work by a master teacher. -Peter Smagorinsky George Hillocks, Jr. is one of the most respected names in English education, and his graduate students have become some of the most important names in the field. In Learning to Teach Narrative Writing to Adolescents, you'll discover the power of his methods as Hillocks takes you inside real classrooms to see how his groundbreaking theories of teaching and learning help adolescents improve as writers. Narrative Writing shows you how focusing your classroom activities on producing content, rather than form, boosts students' engagement, making them active learners-not passive recipients of knowledge. Hillocks demonstrates that breaking any learning task into small, doable pieces allows students to master these tasks and prepares them for more complex learning. In Learning to Teach Narrative Writing to Adolescents he shares the results of many years of teaching narrative writing in culturally and economically diverse Chicago schools. You'll see how "at-risk" kids' competencies increase significantly as they are taught, step-by-step, how to complete important writing tasks, such as: incorporating detail and figurative language creating dialogue expressing inner thoughts portraying people and action writing about scenes and settings combining it all and revising. Hillocks focuses on presenting students with clear instruction and clear objectives, focusing strongly on the procedural knowledge that accompanies academic success-the how to of completing school-based tasks. With his help you'll learn to provide all students with the scaffolding they need to be confident, successful, and fully engaged in their learning. The techniques demonstrated in Narrative Writing have been tested in diverse urban schools. Hillocks provides the data to demonstrate that his methods can give teachers of low-performing and impoverished students new hope for helping adolescentscultivate a meaningful and lasting improvement in their writing abilities. Get Narrative Writing to understand the wisdom of a master educator. Read it to discover an important approach to teaching writing that really works. Implement it for a satisfying way to teach that can make a difference with every student.