Two Writing Teachers Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Melanie shares four ways to reenergize student writers whose enthusiasm and stamina dwindle during more extended writing units. Her ideas are sure to reinvigorate students in engaging and meaningful ways.

Go Deeper:

• Keeping the Energy In a Unit of Study
• Writing as a Gift 

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You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

This episode features Betsy Hubbard, an experienced educator and co-author at Two Writing Teachers. The discussion explores the critical role of executive functioning skills in writing and how deficits in these areas can impact students' performance. Betsy shares practical strategies for teachers to support executive functioning in writing workshops, including techniques for breaking tasks into manageable chunks and providing organizational templates. The episode also covers the importance of incorporating executive functioning activities into the classroom environment. It offers examples of self-regulation techniques to help students overcome challenges in the writing process.

Previous TWT Podcast Episodes Mentioned

• Accommodations for Access to Writing Instruction
• Build Writing Confidence with the "Ready, Do, Done" Model
• Co-Create Writing Goals
• Unlock Strategies for Task Initiation

Go Deeper

• Contingency Maps for Writing Workshops
• FLIPP the Switch
• Quick Facts on Executive Functions from Child Mind Institute

More About Betsy Hubbard: 

• Personal Blogs
  • I’m Living My Words
  • The Power of Poetry
• TWTBlog Posts
• X (formerly Twitter) 

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Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

In today’s Conversation with a Colleague, Stacey chats with Lainie Levin, a gifted interventionist and coach, about helping learners conquer perfectionism. Lainie unveils the manifestations of perfectionism in students, particularly during writing instruction, highlighting key signs to watch for. She shares an innovative work quality continuum she co-created with her students, as a powerful tool to address perfectionist tendencies. Practical strategies are discussed for reframing perfectionist behaviors, fostering a growth mindset, and embracing mistakes as opportunities for growth. Stacey and Lainie also explore the impact of perfectionism on partnerships and group work. Finally, they discuss where perfectionism is most prevalent during the writing process while discussing effective methods for addressing it.

ABOUT LAINIE LEVIN:

Lainie is a dedicated educator with 28 years of teaching experience and a strong advocate for children and public education. She is a gifted interventionist and coach in language arts and math, specializing in meeting the needs of gifted/talented elementary school students. Since 2021, she has been a valued colleague at Two Writing Teachers.

Check out Lainie’s personal blog, Soapbox: The Way I See Things, follow her on X @mrslevin11, or read her Two Writing Teachers blog posts. 

GO DEEPER: 

• Advice for the Perfectionists in Writing Workshop
• Reframing Avoidance: Writers and Perfectionism
• Work-Quality Continuum

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Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

Make sentence structure more straightforward for students with Melanie's intentional activities in this episode. Melanie shares ways she helps students understand the definition of sentences, create sentences with phrases and pictures, and combine sentences. You'll help students recognize and create simple and increasingly complex sentences with Melanie's playful and purposeful ideas.

Go Deeper:

• Sentence Patterning Charts
• Bring on the Fun in Sentence Construction
• Word, Sentence, Paragraph

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Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

Explore the origin and significance of end-of-year reflection letters in this week’s episode. Stacey highlights the unique nature of these letters, which go beyond self-evaluations of academics and instead focus on students reflecting on their growth as learners and individuals. Practical guidelines for structuring the letters are shared, emphasizing flexibility in paragraph structure to suit individual needs. The episode also features touching excerpts from actual student letters, showcasing their accomplishments, thoughts on cooperative group work, and advice for the teacher. The power of these reflection letters as tools for student self-awareness and goal-setting is celebrated, emphasizing the importance of taking a step back to recognize personal growth.

Looking for what you can do after you receive these letters from your students? Check out “My Hope and Dream for You,” which explains how you can respond to your students as they exit your classroom door for the final time.

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Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

We explore the vast potential of student-facing AI tools. Join us as we delve into the benefits of tools like Co:Writer Universal, EverWrite, Grammarly, Read&Write, and Speechify. Discover how these cutting-edge tools revolutionize students' learning, writing, and communication and empower students to reach new heights of academic excellence.

Check out the Los Angeles Unified School District’s AI policies. 

Listen to our previous episode: Boost Writing Instruction with AI.

Related TWTBlog Posts:

• AI Tools for Writing Teachers
• Can AI Write a Good Speech?
• Co:Writer
• Exploring Voice Typing During Writing Workshop
• Three Ways to Use ChatGPT…Tomorrow
• We Need to Talk About AI Essays

AI Tools We Mentioned:

• Co:Writer Universal
• EverWrite
• Grammarly
• Read&Write
• Speechify

Thanks to our affiliates!

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Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

It is helpful to create checklists that are accessible to students so they are manageable, digestible, and possible for students to utilize. In this tip, Melanie shares ways to help students chunk checklists, think with intention, and digitize checklists. In addition, she plants the seeds to help you think about ways to help students self-create checklists that will allow them to grow as writers.

*****
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*****

Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

In this episode, we talk about content creation, personalized learning, accessibility, efficiency & productivity with artificial intelligence. We share various teacher-facing AI tools and discuss how you can incorporate them into your writing instruction.

Go Deeper:

• Leveraging AI for Writing Miniseries on Two Writing Teachers
• Los Angeles Unified School District's AI Page

Previous TWTPod Episodes:

• Navigate a Digital World by Seeing, Hearing, and Reading: A Tip for Tomorrow
• Three Possibilities for Using Chat GPT: A Tip for Tomorrow

AI Tools We Mentioned:

• Bing
• Brisk Teaching
• ChatGPT
• Diffit
• Gemini (previously known as Bard)

*****
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*****

Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

Learn about two engaging ideas for National Poetry Month, which begins on April 1. Stacey shares a bit about creating a collaborative "Living Poetry Anthology" where students curate poems to display throughout the school. Next, she discusses developing personal poetry collections featuring their work, inspirational poems, and reflections on poems they admired. Make poetry come alive for your students – listen now! 

TWTBlog Posts

• A Breakthrough In Poetry: How To Bring Playfulness to Every Genre 
• Building a Living Poetry Anthology
• It’s Alive!
• Starting the Year: Poetry 
• The Doors of Poetry: Guest Blog Post by Sarah Mulhern Gross

Resource List

• Academy of American Poets
• Awakening the Heart, second edition by Georgia Heard 
• National Poetry Month
• Poetry Mentor Texts: Making Reading and Writing Connections, K-8, by Lynne R Dorfman and Rose Cappelli
• Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

*****
Thanks to our affiliate, Libro.fm! 
Use the TWTPod Code to receive 2 audiobook credits for $14.99 with your first month of membership. 
*****

Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.

There's a lot of brain work involved in written expression. This week, Melanie shares a tip to help students reduce their cognitive load, which will help them express their ideas more easily. In this tip, Melanie shares how providing students with sentence frames and a bank of vocabulary words can aid students with difficulty with word retrieval. Plus, she shares ways to shift the agency to students so they are not dependent on their teacher to do this work.
*****
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Marley Spoon: $235 off through 5 boxes -- Makes the first box portion price start at $4.99. Click here or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=6988&id=1261005. 
*****

Send us a text

Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us ratings/reviews on your favorite listening platform.

You may contact us directly if you want us to consult with your school district.

• Melanie Meehan: meehanmelanie@gmail.com
• Stacey Shubitz: stacey@staceyshubitz.com

Email us at contact@twowritingteachers.org for affiliate or sponsorship opportunities.

For more about teaching writing, head to the Two Writing Teachers blog.