Creating Confident Writers: For High School, College, and Life

Book excerpt: Writing should be for an audience other than a teacher, and for a purpose beyond getting a grade. Connecting their classroom experience to research about writing, as well as to framing documents in the field, two seasoned writing teachers distill the lessons they’ve learned about creating confident adolescent and young adult writers. Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn outline a fundamental stance to their approach—to invite, encourage, and celebrate students’ writing—that is then echoed in the book’s three-part structure. There are numerous classroom activities and assignments on topics from creating writing goals to supporting revision, examples of student work, and questions to guide teachers’ reflections. In this book for any teacher of writing, from middle school through college, readers are invited to try strategies and allow students’ voices to emerge, while discussing with colleagues how these approaches might work for them, too.