John McPhee, a master of telling nonfiction stories, became a teacher by accident 43 years ago when Princeton University needed a last-minute replacement. He has steered the course ever since, each ...

I’m sharing my go-to resources for helping young children build their writing skills, whether you’re a parent, homeschooler, or early elementary teacher. In this video, I walk through illustration and ...

I’ve long believed that if we want students to improve as writers, it makes sense to make writing as fun as possible. Ask students how often they experience school-related writing as fun and expect a ...

Route 66, America’s most celebrated highway, is something altogether different today. It is no longer “the best” way to get from Chicago to the West Coast. In many places, the historic road is buried ...

When Craig Schmidt gave his high school English students an assignment based on “Fahrenheit 451,” he threw them a curveball: He told them to use ChatGPT. Schmidt asked the class to write several ...

As a writer, I am aware of the long and pervasive discourse about the difficulty of writing. Writing is arduous and enervating, frequently frustrating, wrought with failure, and also, I believe, a fun ...

Some children enjoy spending hours on end writing paragraphs and stories, but others absolutely dread it.‎ They may have great ideas but struggle to express them on paper. Yet as students move through ...

Spoiler alert: there's nothing in there. There’s even a technological counterattack, as companies roll out technology designed to detect software-composed writing. But the bottom line is that ChatGPT ...

Great teachers know how to improve myriad aspects of student writing: idea generation, organization, evidence marshaling, diction, grammar, and more. But even with tools and techniques in each of ...