Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts

If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers. Recognizing the importance that modeling plays in the learning process, high school English teacher Kelly Gallagher shares how he gets his students to stand next to and pay close attention to model writers, and how doing so elevates his students' writing abilities. Write Like This is built around a central premise: if students are to grow as writers, they need to read good writing, they need to study good writing, and, most important, they need to emulate good writers.

In Write Like This, Kelly emphasizes real-world writing purposes, the kind of writing he wants his students to be doing twenty years from now. Each chapter focuses on a specific discourse: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. In teaching these lessons, Kelly provides mentor texts (professional samples as well as models he has written in front of his students), student writing samples, and numerous assignments and strategies proven to elevate student writing.

By helping teachers bring effective modeling practices into their classrooms, Write Like This enables students to become better adolescent writers. More important, the practices found in this book will help our students develop the writing skills they will need to become adult writers in the real world.

• Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing
• 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents
• Beyond Literary Analysis: Teaching Students to Write with Passion and Authority About Any Text
• The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing
• Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School
• Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12
• Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's Workshop
• Teaching Adolescent Writers
• Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop
• Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It