Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching

Narrative Writing is winner of the Richard Meade Award, given by the National Council of Teacher's of EnglishGeorge Hillocks, Jr. is a master teacher who has had great success working with kids in the Chicago Public Schools for over thirty years. This book will show you why. -Michael W. Smith, author of "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys" Using instructional methods grounded in concrete, practical activity, Hillocks clearly outlines how to help students take the raw material of their experiences and transform it into engaging, well-wrought prose. A masterful work by a master teacher. -Peter SmagorinskyGeorge Hillocks, Jr. is one of the most respected names in English education, and his graduate students have become some of the most important names in the field. In Learning to Teach Narrative Writing to Adolescents, you'll discover the power of his methods as Hillocks takes you inside real classrooms to see how his groundbreaking theories of teaching and learning help adolescents improve as writers. Narrative Writing shows you how focusing your classroom activities on producing content, rather than form, boosts students' engagement, making them active learners-not passive recipients of knowledge. Hillocks demonstrates that breaking any learning task into small, doable pieces allows students to master these tasks and prepares them for more complex learning. In Learning to Teach Narrative Writing to Adolescents he shares the results of many years of teaching narrative writing in culturally and economically diverse Chicago schools. You'll see how "at-risk" kids' competencies increase significantly as they are taught, step-by-step, how to complete important writing tasks, such as: incorporating detail and figurative language creating dialogue expressing inner thoughts portraying people and action writing about scenes and settings combining it all and revising.