Inside Out, Fourth Edition: Strategies for Teaching Writing

"If you're ultimately helping students become creative individuals with a voice; fluent, context-aware experts with language; and engaged and thinking adults, we think you're doing your job as a writing teacher (above and beyond what the standards-of-the-week have to say on the matter)."

"To teach writing well, we don't look someplace 'out there' for rules, formulas, and mimicry," write Dawn Latta Kirby and Darren Crovitz. "We begin, instead, by teaching students to attend to their inner language, to their individual sensations, perceptions, emotions, incipient understandings, observations, and perspectives. Writing, like all other acts of creation, develops from the inside out."

In this highly practical guide filled with a wealth of activities for the classroom, Dawn and Darren continue the long-standing tradition of earlier editions of Inside Out with guidance for building a community of writers, providing innovative and effective strategies for meeting kids where they are and coaching them to write with passion and purpose across all genres. Readers will relish the somewhat irreverent tone that fans of earlier editions have come to expect. Dawn and Darren's updates and revisions in this edition speak directly to today's teacher, offering:

• new strategies and suggestions that incorporate technology in meaningful ways and speak to today's tech natives in terms they understand
• guidance for working with English language learners and their writing
• inventive, reality-based approaches to research
• options for using nonfiction and nontraditional texts in your teaching
• a fresh take on the importance of authentic literacy education, especially in the age of the high-stakes testing and the Common Core
• real-world wisdom and strategies for teaching writing from a team of middle and high school teachers.

From theory to practice, this comprehensive text has everything you'll need to engage your students and get them writing from the inside out.

Dawn Latta Kirby is the coauthor of New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007) and Inside Out, Third Edition (2004). A former high school English teacher as well as a department chair, she taught college classes in English methods, young adult literature, qualitative research methods, and writing in Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. She is currently Professor of English and English Education at Kennesaw State University, where she directs the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project.

Darren Crovitz has taught high school English, first-year composition in community college, and English-as-a-second-language as a Peace Corps volunteer in Latvia. A former writing center coordinator and consultant, he now works with preservice and experienced teachers as director of the English Education program at Kennesaw State University.