EMC is proud to participate in the Oregon Reading Association Winter Institute in Portland at the Crowne Plaza on February 10-11, 2012.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT THAT MATTERS: The Oregon Reading Association is dedicated to providing teachers with exemplary professional development opportunities. This two-day institute offers an in-depth investigation of literacy instruction in support of ORA’s yearlong look at the reading/writing connection.

• On Friday, three educational researchers will explore the reading/writing connection and how current research can help educators implement effective instructional strategies.

• On Saturday, the Common Core State Standards will be explored and small group sessions will offer classroom-tested strategies for implementation. For more information visit http://oregonread.org.

Daily Journal Topics posted on Expository Composition Discovering Your Voice Blog

Zapping Apathy with Daily Journals

What do I like best about the daily journals used by my Creative Writing students? Probably the surprises.

Each day I write on the board: “Today’s journal topic,” followed by a prompt that comes to me or that I adapt from other sources. I tend to draw the prompts from Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away, Susan Shaughnessy’s Walking on Alligators, our Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice, or from a variety of sites that I find through Googling “high school writing prompts,” “journal prompts,” “writing ideas,” or some other similar search terms.

Each journal prompt also goes on Twitter so that absent students can get the day’s prompt. A happy by-product of the tweets is that quite a few people see them, use them, and chime in with ideas. In the past, I’ve used the hashtag #journal, but that one has become sort of busy and distorted, so this semester I’m using #E307, our school’s code for the Creative Writing course. Feel free to follow along and join in!

Gary Anderson, coauthor of Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice