Category: Essay

Becoming Better Together: How I Help Students Magnify the Deeper Meaning of a Text
As a writer and teacher, Donna Lewis Johnson sees herself and her students as literary detectives, reading texts closely in order to notice the telling details that illuminate the characters, setting, and plot moments.

The Time I Changed History With a Fourth-Grade Writing Assignment
n 1987, my fourth grade teacher asked us to imagine life 25 years in the future and to describe, in complete sentences and legible cursive, our future selves and the state of the world. I didn’t understand the power of setting an imagined future to paper. I’d recently written about a pig on a cruise liner and about a macaroni noodle that had adventures with a spoon. “Life in 2012” didn’t seem so different. It was just a story.