Writing-Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions

Offers candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges.

Written by the team at Bard Colleges Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges. As teachers of literature, composition, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, and education, they offer philosophical and theoretical reflections, practical guidance, and personal stories about how to help students become better, more-fluent writers, close readers, and reflective thinkers. This book will be of interest to writing center directors, for what it says about how to do collaborative learning and revision and seeing writing as a way to build community, and to writing teachers for how it demystifies freewriting, focused freewriting, and dialectical notebooks.

Instructors interested in developing a classroom practice of writing will find this collection a rich resource. The essays are well formulated; the volume itself, thoughtfully organized. Iteratively captured in a range of voices and teaching strategies, the underlying argument is compelling. Teaching Theology and Religion

As a former teaching assistant I would have benefited from experiencing a program like that described in Writing-Based Teaching. Paul Baker, Wordsalad.wordpress.com

Any individual, program, or institution seriously interested in understanding and practicing the writing process would benefit from using this text. Alison Cook-Sather, author of Education is Translation: A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching

One of the most important ideas in this collection is that we, as writing teachers, need to develop habits of action and habits of mind that students can take with them. Pat Belanoff, coauthor of Being a Writer: A Community of Writers Revisited.