Living Life Twice

It’s the end of another Australian school year, so I am aware of the level of exhaustion that abounds in schools, and the need to tie up a multitude of loose ends prior to school closing for the summer holidays. Teaching becomes a race to the finish line. The last week of school seems to take the longest time of all the many school weeks.  I am also aware that on summer’s horizon teachers will have some free time to relax and regenerate their energy reserves.- A time for relaxation, holidays, family and recreation. For those of you who have intentions of adopting a new approach to aspects of your teaching in 2013, may I suggest that the summer holidays might present a great opportunity to embrace the inner writer and embrace your very own writer’s notebook. I know many of you read extensively when you are on vacation. Free of the pressure of the classroom, it is possible to indulge in more personal reading; becoming re-acquainted with favorite authors, or to read that book ...

The following notes are condensed from an address to Graduate teachers at Victoria University, December 3, 2012, prior to them taking up their first teaching appointments in schools in Melbourne’s Western Metropolitan Region in 2013. When it comes to teaching writing it is important to be working along side young writers supporting them to: •learn and grow •follow our example as teachers who write •learn from understandings shared about writing In our classrooms we must encourage students to become involved in the things that writers in the wider world actually do. As teachers need to do to do them too. If we don’t do these things we’re asking students to undertake tasks and teaching them to do things we’ve never attempted ourselves.  All writers need a place to keep ideas, thoughts, reactions, words, lists of na...