Sandra Murphy

Through ideas and practices straight from the classrooms of outstanding teachers, this lively resource illustrates writing that makes an impact on a reader, a writer, or a cause—writing that everyone wants to read. The book is rich with student work that shows how writing can make things happen in the world. The authors provide ready-to-use lessons that include a full range of writing, including poetry, narrative, petitions, proposals, emails, self-reflections, long-term projects, and critical analyses.Book Features:Incorporates the voices and practices of many talented writing teachers.Employs an upbeat style with a clear, easy-to-follow framework.Encourages writing that changes minds, tells stories, calls for action, creates awareness or empathy, touches emotions, or promotes new thinking.Provides accessible teaching ideas, short exercises, and student models.Builds on students' experiences with social media and their interest in social issues.

This innovative resource provides teachers with a road map for designing a comprehensive writing curriculum that meets Common Core State Standards. The authors zero in on several big ideas that lead to and support effective practices in writing instruction, such as integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening; teaching writing as a process; extending the range of students’ writing; spiraling and scaffolding a writing curriculum; and collaborating. These ideas are the cornerstone of best researched-based practices as well as the CCSS for writing. The first chapter offers a complete lesson designed around teaching narrative writing and illustrates tried-and-true practices for teaching writing as a process. The remaining chapters explore a broad range of teaching approaches that help students tackle different kinds of narrative, informational, and argumentative writing as well as complexities like audience and purpose. Each chapter focuses on at least one of the uncommonly good ideas and illustrates how to create curricula around it. Uncommonly Good Ideas includes model lessons and assignments, mentor texts, teaching strategies, student writing, and practical guidance for moving the ideas from the page into the classroom.

Through ideas and practices straight from the classrooms of outstanding teachers, this lively resource illustrates writing that makes an impact on a reader, a writer, or a cause-writing that everyone wants to read. The book is rich with student work that shows how writing can make things happen in the world. The authors provide ready-to-use lessons that include a full range of writing, including poetry, narrative, petitions, proposals, emails, self-reflections, long-term projects, and critical analyses.Book Features:Incorporates the voices and practices of many talented writing teachers.Employs an upbeat style with a clear, easy-to-follow framework.Encourages writing that changes minds, tells stories, calls for action, creates awareness or empathy, touches emotions, or promotes new thinking.Provides accessible teaching ideas, short exercises, and student models.Builds on students' experiences with social media and their interest in social issues.

In this book, authors Murphy and O’Neill propose a new way forward, moving away from high-stakes, test-based writing assessment and the curriculum it generates and toward an approach to assessment that centers on student learning and success. Reviewing the landscape of writing assessment and existing research-based theories on writing, the authors demonstrate how a test-based approach to accountability and current practices have undermined effective teaching and learning of writing. This book bridges the gap between real-world writing that takes place in schools, college, and careers and the writing that students are asked to do in standardized writing assessments to offer a new ecological approach to writing assessment.Murphy and O’Neill’s new way forward turns accountability inside out to help teachers understand the role of formative assessments and assessment as inquiry. It also brings the outside in, by bridging the gap between authentic writing and writing assessment. Through these two strands, readers learn how assessment systems can be restructured to become better aligned with contemporary understandings of writing and with best practices in teaching. With examples of assessments from elementary school through college, chapters include guidance on designing assessments to address multiple kinds of writing, integrate reading with writing, and incorporate digital technology and multimodality. Emphasizing the central role that teachers play in systemic reform, the authors offer sample assessments developed with intensive teacher involvement that support learning and provide information for the evaluation of programs and schools.This book is an essential resource for graduate students, instructors, scholars and policymakers in writing assessment, composition, and English education.

In this book, authors Murphy and O’Neill propose a new way forward, moving away from high-stakes, test-based writing assessment and the curriculum it generates and toward an approach to assessment that centers on student learning and success. Reviewing the landscape of writing assessment and existing research-based theories on writing, the authors demonstrate how a test-based approach to accountability and current practices have undermined effective teaching and learning of writing. This book bridges the gap between real-world writing that takes place in schools, college, and careers and the writing that students are asked to do in standardized writing assessments to offer a new ecological approach to writing assessment.Murphy and O’Neill’s new way forward turns accountability inside out to help teachers understand the role of formative assessments and assessment as inquiry. It also brings the outside in, by bridging the gap between authentic writing and writing assessment. Through these two strands, readers learn how assessment systems can be restructured to become better aligned with contemporary understandings of writing and with best practices in teaching. With examples of assessments from elementary school through college, chapters include guidance on designing assessments to address multiple kinds of writing, integrate reading with writing, and incorporate digital technology and multimodality. Emphasizing the central role that teachers play in systemic reform, the authors offer sample assessments developed with intensive teacher involvement that support learning and provide information for the evaluation of programs and schools.This book is an essential resource for graduate students, instructors, scholars and policymakers in writing assessment, composition, and English education.

To the moon and back, here are 10 tales with a twist. The unlikely characters have one thing in common - they're ready and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals. As the old saying goes, "You have to watch out for the quiet ones."From a quirky inventor, humored by his neighbors, to two old men out to dinner, to a more-than-meets-the-eye beverage maker, the stories will take you into the minds of the overlooked and unseen. Ignore them at your own risk.

These short stories are true. They are part of a vision to encourage others and oneself by remembering things that happened along life's journey and sharing them through a hindsight lens, a lens that has been illuminated by acknowledging God's grace and divine providence. The most amazing thing about this book is the great influence of two righteous people, Ralph and Lela Franklin, on the lives of each of the individuals who wrote a story in our book. Their honorable lives have had a multi-generational as well as a spiritual impact on our family. Moreover, Lela's accomplishments in education and her love for writing have been a continual blessing on our entire family. God's hand of love moved through our parents in a magnificent way, paving a clear path for later generations to emulate. A widow with six girls to raise leaves Tennessee for a new start up north in Detroit, Michigan. There, her fourth child meets and marries a man who becomes a Baptist minister. The stories in this book are written by their offspring and descendants. The stories convey the strength of the family matriarchs, the death of a wonderful father, and the turbulent times in Detroit in 1967 and 1968. The stories disclose the secret hopes and dreams of a woman who wants to get married and have children. The suspense is palpable as one story reveals the outcome of a bridge crossing and another story relays the results of what started as an everyday drive in an old car. The stories recount the attainment of educational scholarships and job opportunities and lay bare the universal truism that bad things can happen to anybody, young or old. The book details how ordinary days and routine activities can become tests of will that later turn into testimonies.

This volume reports the results of a series of investigations of the properties of writing tasks, their authors' intentions, and the responses that these tasks evoked in student-writers and teacher-raters. The volume explains how both student-writers and teacher-raters, in their reading of the same topic/text, can arrive at different meanings. The investigations undertaken led the authors to make a number of recommendations about selecting subjects, specifying audience and mode, formulating instructions, and wording the topic. These recommendations are presented in non-technical language in a comprehensive set of Guidelines for Designing Topics for Writing Assessments.

This volume reports the results of a series of investigations of the properties of writing tasks, their authors' intentions, and the responses that these tasks evoked in student-writers and teacher-raters. The volume explains how both student-writers and teacher-raters, in their reading of the same topic/text, can arrive at different meanings. The investigations undertaken led the authors to make a number of recommendations about selecting subjects, specifying audience and mode, formulating instructions, and wording the topic. These recommendations are presented in non-technical language in a comprehensive set of Guidelines for Designing Topics for Writing Assessments.