Lessons That Change Writers

In Lessons That Change Writers, Nancie has narrowed and deepened her conversation with teachers, to focus on the minilesson as a vehicle for helping students improve their writing. She shares over a hundred of these writing lessons which are described by her students as "the best of the best." The lessons fall into the following four categories that provide the structure for this book:

• Lessons about Topics: ways to develop ideas for pieces of writing that will matter to writers and to their readers
• Lessons about Principles of Writing: ways to think and write deliberately to create literature
• Lessons about Genre: in which we observe and name the ways that good free verse poems, formatted poetry, essays, short stories, memoirs, thank-you letters, profiles, parodies, and book reviews work and
• Lessons about Conventions: what readers' eyes and minds have been trained to expect, and how marks and forms function to give writing more voice and power and to make reading predictable and easy.

Nancie Atwell is one of the most respected educators in the U.S. and across the world. Winner of the Varkey Foundation's inaugural Global teacher Prize, she donated the $1 million award to the Center for Teaching and Learning, the K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie's classic In the Middle, now in its third edition, has inspired generations of teachers; in it she describes her teaching journey and the practices she developed that led to her nomination. Thomas Newkirk calls In the Middle "the greatest book on literacy teaching ever written in this country." Visit Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle for more about the book and Nancie. A middle school English teacher for almost forty years, Nancie is also the first classroom teacher to be awarded the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, both for distinguished research in the teaching of English. She was also honored as NCTE's Outstanding Middle School English Teacher and as the River of Words Poetry Teacher of the Year. She has received honorary doctoral degrees from Middlebury College and the University of New Hampshire. Nancie's books for Heinemann include Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School, which takes teachers inside her award-winning school to learn about the innovations that make the biggest impact on achievement and community; Lessons That Change Writers, a year's worth of instruction straight from Nancie's file cabinets; and Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, which helps teachers to jumpstart their teaching of writing and literature each day by unpacking a poem with their students. Her DVDs Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle give teachers a seat in her workshop as she presents lessons and conducts conferences that transform her students' literacy - and their lives.