More About Teachers & Writers Collaborative
About Teachers & Writers
MISSION Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) seeks to educate the imagination by offering innovative creative writing programs for students and…
Workshops & Professional Development
Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) provides school-based and after-school writing programs led by professional writers for K-12 students, professional development…
Resources
Books T&W has published resources about the teaching of creative writing for more nearly 50 years. With more…
NY Poetry Out Loud
What is Poetry Out Loud? Poetry Out Loud (POL), an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts and the…
50th Stories: A Nurturing Parent: Read to Me at T&W
By Susan Straub T&W was a nourishing parent for my neophyte and developing Read To Me Program. Through T&W’s generous welcome, I got immediate street cred and access to the NYC Board of Ed’s teen parent program, LYFE. Additionally, I was able to apply for grants available to nonprofit organizations to develop and expand….
Teaching Siran: Exchanging Words and Worlds in a Sixth-Grade Classroom
By Rachel DeWoskin My eleven-year-old student Siran turned to me recently during a conversation about Shel Silverstein’s poetry and said, in her native Chinese, “English is so wasteful!” I had just been thinking the opposite, that rhyme is a lovely expression of compression and economy. “Why?” I asked. She pointed to a “k” at the…
Congratulations to the Young Authors of 457X!
My Favorite Word is Love is an anthology of poetry by the second-grade students of Sheridan Academy of Young Leaders 457X. The title comes from a poem by Gregory Rodriguez where he envisioned spring having a favorite word—love. For twenty days, students learned about hyperboles, personification, metaphors, alliteration, similes, line breaks, syllables, and haikus. The…
Middle Schoolers as Role Models for Peace: Three Writing Exercises to Foster Empathy
By Kelly Quayle Richie is five foot nothing and not even a hundred pounds, just months out of elementary school. He wears a SpongeBob backpack high on his shoulders and Gap Kids khakis picked out by his mother. He’s never seen an R-rated movie, never been reprimanded in school, and rarely comes to class without…
Congratulations to the Young Authors of Hamilton Grange Middle School!
This residency was made possible by the New York City College Access for All Middle School Initiative. Artist Letter to Students, Passion is something that we all must hold onto. Some of us know exactly what we want to do from when we are young and for others, it takes time. However, the best part…
Adventures in Screenwriting: Returning to “Beginner’s Mind”
By Ben Berman How does a writing teacher return to the “beginner’s mind” of students, and how does doing so influence his teaching practice? Ben Berman shares how the frustrations he experienced and the lessons he learned when he tried to write a screenplay changed the way he approaches teaching writing to his high school…
The World Had Gone Mad
A Year Without Rain by Brianna (11th grade) The year. The worst year in living memory. Nothing happened at its proper time. It seemed as if the world had gone mad. The first rains were late. The blazing sun returned, more fierce than it had ever been. The earth burned like hot coals. When the rain dried…
Language and War: A Unit Plan for English Class
by Tim Myers Editors note: This article was originally published in Teachers & Writers Magazine 1997. Can adolescents learn anything profound about the intricate and powerful relationship between language and war? In a century haunted by phrases such as “acceptable losses” and “mutually assured destruction,” can we as teachers help guide our students to some…
50th Stories: Fifty Years of And
By Christina Davis As I write this from my desk at a nearly 400-year-old educational bureaucracy (alias Harvard), I am astonished to reflect on a place—and such a fully catalyzed community—that instead of impediment upon impediment managed somehow to place possibility before all. In its fifty years of existence, Teachers & Writers Collaborative has never…
The Story We Tell Ourselves Afterward: At the Veterans Writing Workshop
By David Surface When I tell people that I work with military veterans, one of the first things they say is, It must help them to talk about their experiences, or, It must be good for them to get those terrible things off their chest. The truth is that there are many other places where…