At this website, I celebrate the writing process, writers workshop, and teachers who write alongside their students.

"We write to prove that we think." So read the sign on my classroom door when I finally became the writing teacher I had hoped to become.

For the first five or six years of my teaching career, I did what many new teachers still do today: I emulated bad practices that had been done to me in my own school days. I passed out a lot of low level worksheets, I made my students memorize vocabulary words they had no connection with, I assigned reading that I knew many students wouldn't actually do, and I lectured too much. Way too much.

I suspected that teaching could be a lot more authentic than what I was doing, but college hadn't taught me how to break with the traditional schooling methods. Then in 1996, inspired by my new association with colleagues from the Northern Nevada Writing Project, I added a new tool to my classroom: a weekly writer's workshop. It took me two or three years to make the tool work in my classroom and with my style of teaching. When I worked out the kinks, I knew I had found the genuine educational environment that I would have thrived in when I was a student.

My own students started thriving as writers and thinkers. I couldn't believe the difference.

Each day, we (yes, me too!) wrote down any new connections we'd made that day into our writers' notebooks. Then once a week, we devoted an hour to choose one of our new ideas and take it through the writing process. By semester's end, I expected my students to have taken five connections through the entire writing process--from pre-write to publish--and these pieces of writing became their writing portfolios. This was my adaptation of writers workshop, and this tool completely changed my teaching. My students' portfolios, in the years I was using my workshop the best, counted as 80% of my their final grade. My students owned every idea in their portfolios, and for the first time they owned the grade they earned. My students wrote to prove that they thought.

I shifted the focus of every subject I was assigned to teach--American literature, poetry, Shakespeare, mythology, non-fiction, journalism, etymology, grammar--to work with a writers workshop environment. It always worked. What's more, I had less to grade than I ever had before. Self-evaluation and peer response became such integral parts of my workshop that I found myself with weekends free of paper grading for the first time since beginning teaching.

In 2001, I left the classroom to become the Director of the Northern Nevada Writing Project. As Director and as a full-time writing trainer, I created resources for teachers that I shared during every one of my trainings. The WritingFix website is one of my proudest accomplishments, as is the Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Guide, because these resources have become tools that are used by teachers around the world, not just in Northern Nevada, which is my home.

I began this "Always Write" website in 2007. As I continue my career as both a writing teacher and a writing trainer, I will house and offer my original resources and teaching ideas here. I hope you are inspired to become the best teacher you can be, and that you will understand how "We write to prove that we think" should be the motto of every classroom.

Workshop: The 7 Elements of a Crafted Writing Lesson

This has quickly become the most popular training I have ever offered to teachers. During the 2009-2010 school year, I will be bringing this workshop to six new schools here in Northern Nevada.

I created this training four years ago after observing and interviewing a dozen teachers who absolutely loved to design new writing lessons for their students. I created a list of seven elements that I found strong evidence of in all of their lessons. My training asks teachers to self-rate their current use of these seven elements, then to spend a school year working with their grade level to improve their skills with one or two of the elements as they collaborate to create two new lessons that use all seven elements.

I have created a new page for this training here at my website, and I am in the process of posting many of the materials from the training that the teachers I work with use. Click here to access this new page I am developing.

Workshop: Writing Across the Curriculum

My first inservice of the new school year begins September 21 here in Northern Nevada. I am pleased to say that I have taken my materials from this Writing Across the Curriculum workshop and posted them at a new page here at my website. Click here to access this new page I have created.

I hope the materials I have shared here inspire all teachers (not just the ones in my class) to consider how they're already requiring their students to think about content with writing, but mostly I hope it inspires them to begin crafting meaningful assignments that help students think even more deeply about what they've learned.

My Exit Tickets Across the Curriculum Materials

I can't tell you what the "best" one is, but I will share my list of twelve texts that I continually have the most success with as a writing teacher. I invite you to compile a similar list and share it with your colleagues or e-mail it to me so I can post it here.

Click here to see my list of twelve favorite mentor texts.

I am pleased to say that I am offering a new product, which was inspired by the recent writing across the curriculum trainings I have been doing here in Northern Nevada.

I have been working with a dozen schools on a program I am calling Exit Tickets Across the Curriculum, which asks all teachers at a school to add a weekly Exit Ticket assignment to their formative assessment "toolboxes." When every teacher at a school is requiring a weekly exit ticket, students' abilities to craft paragraphs and explain their learning at deeper levels of understanding increases greatly. By accessing my products page, you can learn more about these materials.

Do Your Students Know You're a Writer?

I believe that--to be the best writing teacher possible--teachers need to write and show their students what they've written. So in summer 2008, I launched the Mr. Borilla Project, which encouraged teachers everywhere to write short narratives about the teachers from their pasts who changed their lives in positive ways. Mike Borilla (pictured at left) was the teacher who changed my life forever. He is indirectly responsible for me becoming a teacher, for this website, and for the WritingFix website, which I maintain.

I am pleased to say that my Mr. Borilla Project has been featured at a new inservice class for teachers that my wife--Dena--and I are continuing to sponsor in Northern Nevada. The class--Improving Narrative Writing with 4th-8th grade Writers--will require all participants to take brief narratives about teachers from their pasts all the way through the writing process. All participants in this class will be required to post their finished narratives at the special webpage I have set up at Edublogs.

You know, I'm not a published writer other than the things I post at my own websites. I don't teach writing to convince my students that they should become published writers; oh no, I teach writing because it promotes lifelong learning and thinking.

I make sure my students see that I am a lifelong learner and thinker, and I show them evidence that I learned these skills through my writing over the years.

At my I'm a Writer page, I have posted many pieces of my own writing that show my process.

If you've never shown your students your past or present writing, I challenge you to begin doing so. When you become part of your writing community, the amount of quality writing your students do increases!