Renew! : Become a Better and More Authentic Writing Teacher

When was the last time you shook up your writing instruction? In Renew!: Become a Better and More Authentic Writing Teacher, author Shawna Coppola builds on the premise that our students are ever-changing, and so is our collective knowledge base. Instructional strategies that have worked in the past may need to evolve accordingly. Coppola guides K-8 writing teachers with a three-part framework for Rethinking, Revising, and Renewing their approaches and finding new energy along the way. Using the framework, Renew! examines the most pervasive educational practices in writing instruction and poses questions that guide teachers to revise those practices to ensure they are effective for all students. Coppola believes the work is challenging, yet critical, referencing R. Buckminster Fuller's Knowledge Doubling Curve: According to Fuller's paradigm, the amount of time it takes for us to increase our collective knowledge base by 100 percent will continue to shrink the older we get. If this is true or even close to being true show can we, as educators, ever feel satisfied with teaching our students the same concepts, using the same methodologies and practices, that we have in the past? The book offers a road map for renewing key aspects of our practice, including: How we teach the writing process: Over time and frequent usage, some of our favorite teaching strategies can become rigid. Coppola gives a candid account of how her enthusiasm for the writing process as an undergraduate led her to teach writing for years as a set of pre-determined steps. Now she teaches that there are many variations of the writing process and many twists and turns along the path. One foundational strategy used is opening up her own process as a writer and her writer's notebooks to students and encouraging them to think and talk about their process with classmates. What we mean by Writing: Coppola argues that drawing isn't an accompaniment to writing; it is writing. It's another form of composition