In his farewell reflection upon leaving the classroom, teacher Jeremy Hyler says he will be “working for an organization that believes in making every student successful through the programs they offer and not just selling a product or serving a subset of our students.”
Using the strategies he shares here, ELA teacher and professional development author Jeremy Hyler has been able to reach more middle grades students and help them understand how they can power up their ability to communicate by learning grammar skills and code switching.
Argument Writing / Create Compose Connect
by Jeremy Hyler · Published 12/16/2020 · Last modified 02/03/2021
When the pandemic began Jeremy Hyler and his 6th graders were working on argument writing – choosing topics, evaluating sources and drafting opinions. How to simulate all that online? His colleague Dr. Troy Hicks offered to help. Here’s the 2-part lesson they came up with.
How can teachers convince students that learning grammar is worth the effort and can improve their writing? Jeremy Hyler and Troy Hicks suggest ways to implement a range of online tools to bring grammar alive for classes. Lots of ideas, writes Erin Corrigan-Smith.
From Texting to Teaching: Grammar Instruction in a Digital Age by Hyler and Hicks led teacher Desiree Tabor Carter to think about technology tools strategically and inspired her to overhaul her website, adding a grammar and vocabulary page to each course section.
Kevin Hodgson invites Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner to share their thinking about the need to teach argument in the context of students’ authentic digital lives, using the structure of a traditional argument approach with such texts as videos and social media.
Assessing Students’ Digital Writing provides teachers with a clear path to examine the compositional moves of young writers working with various media in a way that makes sense to the teachers and still gives meaningful feedback for kids, says Kevin Hodgson.
Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World lays out the rationale, as well as a path forward, for expanding the definitions of reading, showing how to engage readers in authentic experiences using varied texts, says Kevin Hodgson.
Technology allows us to record and reflect on the writing process in ways that pencil and paper could not, says digital writing expert Troy Hicks. The MS teacher turned college prof demonstrates with a video demo’ing how we might teach sentence combining.
If asking student writers to develop voice, stamina and range isn’t hard enough, says teacher educator Troy Hicks, we now have digital tools to contend with. Watch as Hicks helps his 6th grade daughter think through her creation of a book report video.
