Write Like This

Kelly Gallagher's Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling & Mentor Texts made me even more excited to be going back to my 6-8 language arts classroom next fall. As with his other books I loved his voice and convictions related to teaching. This is a nice complementary text to Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them, one of my favorites. Both of the books heavily focus on the value of teachers writing with their students.

Gallagher organized Write Like This by starting with a rationale chapter highlighting the importance of writing instruction, followed by six chapters explaining how to scaffold specific writing purposes, a chapter about revision and editing, and a concluding chapter. Each of the writing purpose chapters provided multiple layers of support in order to familiarize students with writing related to the purpose that students would be able to connect to in their everyday lives (as well as in their future lives as productive citizens). I loved that the ideas will provide me with a lot of different ways to explore in my own writer's notebook over the summer.

The final chapter highlighted Gallagher's ten core values that have emerged over time throughout his teaching career. Gallagher stated, "If I sit and think about how daunting it is to walk into a classroom with the intention of teaching wave after wave of adolescents how to become better writers, it can be overwhelming. One way I avoid becoming overwhelmed is by consciously returning to my core beliefs--the philosophical underpinnings, if you will, of my approach to teaching writing," (p. 223). I agree with Gallagher, it is energizing as a teacher to return to core beliefs, to think about our convictions and our students and focus on what really matters in education. I continue to be inspired by Kelly Gallagher and am excited that I still have another one of his books, Teaching Adolescent Writers, on my TBR shelf.