Writing Matters is a podcast perfect for professional development and personal learning. You can watch full episodes on YouTube, or listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, or Soundcloud. Check back every Wednesday for a new episode!
Andy Schoenborn is a teacher of more than 18 years and currently teaches English at Mt. Pleasant High School in Michicagn. Andy is also a teacher-writer, a celebrated author, and longtime writing partner and colleague of Dr. Troy Hicks. They are currently working on a book together titled “Creating Confident Writers”. Andy has also served as the past president of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English.
In this episode, Andy shares a variety of ways he uses feedback to guide student writers and the importance of feedback in his own writing life. He is a big fan of the critical friend protocol, which begins by getting students to engage in what’s good about a piece of writing first. He remarks on how this protocol most closely mirrors his experience with professional editors.
Learn more about the critical friend protocol here: http://buildingpublicunderstanding.org/assets/files/critical_friend_conv.pdf
Andy also shares his go-to tip for engaging students, which is having them create paper proposals as a way to frame the rhetorical situation and launch them into the writing process. This project helps him to decipher what students are genuinely invested in, and gives them the space to get creative. When students start thinking about their own thinking they become invested, and that’s when metacognition comes into play.
Finally, Andy and Troy share the importance of having an active writing practice to coincide with your writing instruction. Andy shares how it helps him see his students are writers alongside himself, rather than simply just his students.
You can learn more about Andy Schoenborn at andrewschoenborn.weebly.com and follow him on Twitter @aschoenborn
Are you new to Writable and curious to learn more? Create a free account, request a quote, or schedule a quick demo.
