"Penny Kittle is an extraordinary teacher who writes. And because she has taught in classrooms ranging from first grade through high school, these short essay-stories show the full range of what it means to teach today." Don Graves has this to say about Penny Kittle, having seen her at work. He also believes that it is in the shared story, teacher's and student's, that solutions exist in an era that maximizes measurement, that sees scores and standards as the norm. Penny sees way beyond the numbers. She appreciates faces, lives, passions, and very difficult personal struggles. And she responds in her teaching and writing. With this captivating collection of 19 essays, Penny takes us straight from her classroom to our own hearts. Penny wrests from the teacher's life-its trials and triumphs, frustration, fury, and fun-all the emotional data that opens up her mind to good, solid instruction. It also frees her, making her ever-willing to lay herself open to her students. She writes with them, seeks their help, and teaches them by example-showing them exactly what the function of writing is, and how to think, understand, and read differently as writers themselves. Penny's mentor, Donald Murray, interviews her at the end of her book. He asks how, as a mother, wife, and teacher, she found the time to write and what she has learned as a published writing teacher. Read Penny's stories and be reminded of the importance of your work as a teacher. Think of the stories of your own you could tell. Notice how you will observe your students differently. Cheer for their accomplishments, and your own, as you tackle the difficult work of learning together.

Public Teaching: One Kid at a Time

Biographies & Memoirs

Kittle, Penny

Professionals & Academics

Heinemann

Read Kittle's stories of teaching and learning. Then write your own. I plan to. - Tom Romano, author of Crafting Authentic Voice   For twenty years Penny Kittle has woven together artful teaching and a love of language, celebrating the written word with classes from elementary school through graduate school. Now, she shares the stories of students with whom she's celebrated, struggled, and learned. More than a teaching memoir, The Greatest Catch is a close-up look at how to teach powerful lessons and how to learn powerful lessons from teaching - especially from teaching writing.   Kittle teaches her students that writing is a tool for developing their intellectual, academic, and emotional selves, and in these essays, she shows how both she and her students' lives have been profoundly influenced by writing. You'll look over her shoulder as she tries to win over a mischievous third grader, works with a fifth-grade alcoholic, and attempts to make sense of her profession as she watches secondary students drop out of school. And in each instance, you'll see how writing can provide an outlet for difficult feelings, build connections and community, or foster resiliency in writers of any age.   Best of all, The Greatest Catch is a model for your own professional development. In addition to her inspirational and pragmatic stories, Kittle includes Craft Notes that demonstrate how she composed her essays so that you can use the same strategies for your classroom life. You'll find these tools immediately useful for structuring reflective writing that helps you uncover the many layers of meaning in your work, just as Kittle, herself, has.   Join Penny Kittle in the journey of a teaching lifetime and learn from her experience. Begin with any essay in The Greatest Catch or read it cover to cover. You'll find that no matter where you start you'll end up at the same place: inspired to teach, write, and learn.

The Greatest Catch: A Life in Teaching

Learn more about the Heinemann Seminar based on this book: Inside the Teaching of Writing Your curriculum is packed, and you have barely enough instructional time to teach students essential writing skills, let alone how to combine those skills to form cohesive, compelling work. Fortunately, there is a solution to the time crunch, a quicker, more effective way to help children understand the complexities of writing, and Don Graves and Penny Kittle are ready to share it with you. In Inside Writing, Graves and Kittle show you the power behind an apprenticeship approach to writing instruction where you mentor students using your own writing-even if you don't consider yourself a writer. Inside Writing is a practical, flexible three-part program that gives you numerous entryways for learning how to model the central elements of the craft: <ul>
<li>topic choice </li> <li>rereading </li> <li>details </li> <li>response </li> <li>conventions </li> <li>the writing life. </li> </ul>
Begin with any aspect of Inside Writing, and you'll discover new insights about high-quality writing instruction. The DVD: go inside real classrooms to watch as teachers from grades 2-6 demonstrate their writing process for students, and hear teachers and students share what a difference this teaching technique makes; hear commentary tracks from Graves and Kittle that underscore important instructional moments; listen in as the authors discuss their own writing processes; and print seventy-eight quick-writes prompts form your computer's DVD drive. The book: read about the voluminous research that supports the efficacy of the apprenticeship method for teaching children to write; strengthen the link between instructional theory and your own day-to-day classroom-teaching practices; and gain a new understanding of the role of writing in both your students' lives and yours. My Quick Writes notebook: Use Graves' favorite Quick Write topics to practice your own writing and reflect on it; find prompts for in-class quick writes with children that prepare them for timed testing situations without giving over your writing workshop to mere test prep; and make connections between your writing process and your students'. Sharpen your writing instruction by learning to trust your own writing. Then teach your students in a powerful, lasting way that will help them to not only understand the elements of writing, but also to combine them into better finished products. Apprentice yourself to Donald Graves and Penny Kittle and go Inside Writing. Click here for a brief walkthrough of the book, notebook and DVD.

Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft

Reference

Graves, Donald H.

Words, Language & Grammar

Please join us in congratulating Penny Kittle for her 2009 NCTE Britton Award forWrite Beside Them! 
This book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the journey: all I've been putting into my teaching for the last two decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual conferences with students.
-Penny KittleWhat makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them.Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and DVD that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing.Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section ofWrite Beside Them describes a specific element of Kittle's workshop:<ul>
<li>
Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes </li>
<li>
Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts</li>
<li>
Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres</li>
<li>
Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style </li>
<li>
Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading. </li>
</ul>All along the way, Kittle demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition,Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the accompanying DVD takes you right inside Penny's classroom. Its video clips explicitly model how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids.Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher.Write Beside Them debuts as the field's most comprehensive, contemporary, and practical book on high school writing. Kittle not onlytells how a skillful writing teacher operates, she shows you on the accompanying DVD, with clips of kids at work in every stage of a writing workshop. And all this glorious teaching happens with real, sometimes struggling kids who remind us of our own classrooms and students. Write Beside Them is the whole package.-Harvey DanielsAuthor of Content-Area Writing and Subjects MatterClick here to view a sample video from the DVD.

Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing

"We believe new technologies can advance both the teaching and learning of writing." -The National Commission on Writing in American Schools and Colleges, The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Writing Revolution, 2003. Years later and we're still waiting to see how it can really be done. The wait is over. "In clean, clear prose that unravels the labyrinth of new terms and applications, Troy guides us towards a writing workshop for this age. His steady, smart advice eases the transition between the elements of writing workshop we know matter to the tools that can take each to a new place, one comfortably familiar, but with a decidedly updated feel. And this man has his priorities straight. He focuses first on the writer, then on the writing, and lastly on the technology." -Penny Kittle Author of Write Beside Them Troy Hicks holds sight on good writing workshop instruction. Where others have talked about new technologies and how they change writing, Hicks shows you how to use new technologies to enhance the teaching of writing you already do. Chapters are organized around the familiar principles of the writing workshop: student choice, active revision, studying author's craft, publication beyond the classroom, and assessment of both product and process. In each chapter you'll learn how to expand and improve your teaching by smartly incorporating new technologies like wikis, blogs, and other forms of multimedia. Throughout, you'll find reference to resources readily available to you and your class online. He also includes a practical set of lessons for how to use wikis to explore a key concept in digital writing: copyright. New literacies are developing around us at what sometimes seems like the speed of light. It's hard to keep it all in focus. Let Troy Hicks guide you through the complexities of what it all means for your classroom so your students' writing can grow right in step with our changing times and technologies. Troy Hicks hosts a companion website where teachers are connecting, sharing ideas, and learning more about teaching digital writing in K-12 classrooms. Join the discussion at http://digitalwritingworkshop.wikispaces.com/

The Digital Writing Workshop

Hicks, Troy

"I believe each of my students must craft an individual reading life of challenge, whim, curiosity, and hunger, and I've discovered that it is not too late in high school to lead a non-reader to reading. It's never too late."-Penny Kittle Penny Kittle wants us to face the hard truths every English teacher fears: too many kids don't read the assigned texts, and some even manage to slip by without having ever read a single book by the time they graduate. As middle and high school reading declines, college professors lament students' inability to comprehend and analyze complex texts, while the rest of us wonder: what do we lose as a society when so many of our high school graduates have no interest in reading anything? In Book Love Penny takes student apathy head on, first by recognizing why students don't read and then showing us that when we give kids books that are right for them, along with time to read and regular response to their thinking, we can create a pathway to satisfying reading that leads to more challenging literature and ultimately, a love of reading. With a clear eye on the reality of today's classrooms, Penny provides practical strategies and advice on: <ul>
<li>increasing volume, capacity, and complexity over time </li> <li>creating a balance of independent reading, text study, and novel study </li> <li>helping students deepen their thinking through writing about reading </li> <li>building a classroom library with themes that matter to 21st century kids. </li> </ul>
Book Love is a call to arms for putting every single kid, no exceptions allowed, on a personal reading journey. But much more than that, it's a powerful reminder of why we became English teachers in the first place: our passion for books. Books matter. Stories heal. The right book in the hands of a kid can change a life forever. We can't wait for anyone else to teach our students a love of books-it's up to us and the time is now. If not you, who? For information about the Book Love Foundation, which provides classroom libraries to deserving teachers and schools, visit booklovefoundation.org.

Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

"Writing With Mentors is one of the best books I've read on harnessing the power of mentor texts to spur authentic student writing." --Kelly Gallagher, author of Write Like This "Writing With Mentors has transformed the way I think about using exemplar pieces." --Christopher Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love with Close Reading "I am certain Don [Graves] would have celebrated these wise, kind, and fearless advocates for young writers." --Penny Kittle, author of Write Beside Them In Writing with Mentors, high school teachers Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell prove that the key to cultivating productive, resourceful writers-writers who can see value and purpose for writing beyond school-is using dynamic, hot-off-the-press mentor texts. In this practical guide, they provide savvy strategies for: --finding and storing fresh new mentor texts, from trusted traditional sources to the social mediums of the day --grouping mentor texts in clusters that show a diverse range of topics, styles, and approaches --teaching with lessons that demonstrate the enormous potential of mentor texts at every stage of the writing process. In chapters that follow the scaffolded instruction Allison and Rebekah use in their own classrooms, you'll discover how using mentor texts can unfold across the year, from inspiration and planning to drafting, revising, and "going public" in final publication. Along the way, you'll find yourself reaching every writer in the room, whatever their needs. "Our hope in this book," they write, "is to show you a way mentors can help you teach anything you need or want to teach in writing. A way that is grounded in the work of real writers and the real reading you do every day. A way that is sustainable and fresh, and will serve your students long after they leave your classroom."

Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts

Marchetti, Allison

O'Dell, Rebekah

This book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the journey: all I've been putting into my teaching for the last two decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual conferences with students. -Penny Kittle What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and companion video that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing. Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Penny's workshop: <ul>
<li> Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes </li> <li> Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts </li> <li> Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres </li> <li> Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style </li> <li> Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading </li> </ul>
All along the way, Penny demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the online videos take you right inside Penny's classroom, explicitly modeling how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids. Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher. Penny was the recipient of the 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them.

"Teaching is art-creation-and a curriculum map is only as good as the teacher who considers it, who questions it, and who revises it to meet the needs of each year's students." -Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle Two teachers. Two classrooms. One school year. 180 Days represents the collaboration of two master teachers-Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle-over an entire school year: planning, teaching, and reflecting within their own and each other's classrooms in California and New Hampshire. Inspired by a teacher's question, "How do you fit it all in?" they identified and prioritized the daily, essential, belief-based practices that are worth spending time on. They asked, "Who will these students be as readers and writers after a year under our care?" What we make time for matters: what we plan, how we revise our plans while teaching, and how we reflect and decide what's next. The decision-making in the moment is the most essential work of teaching, and it's the ongoing study of the adolescents in front of us that has the greatest impact on our thinking. With both the demands of time and the complexity of diverse students in mind, Kelly and Penny mapped out a year of engaging literacy practices aligned to their core beliefs about what matters most. They share their insights on managing time and tasks and offer teaching strategies for engaging students in both whole class and independent work. Video clips of Kelly and Penny teaching in each other's classrooms bring this year to life and show you what a steadfast commitment to belief-based instruction looks like in action. 180 Days. Make every moment matter. Teach fearlessly. Empower all students to live literate lives.

180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents

Gallagher, Kelly

Your curriculum is packed, and you have barely enough instructional time to teach students essential writing skills, let alone how to combine those skills to form cohesive, compelling work. Fortunately, there is a solution to the time crunch, a quicker, more effective way to help children understand the complexities of writing, and Don Graves and Penny Kittle are ready to share it with you. 
In Inside Writing, Graves and Kittle show you the power behind an apprenticeship approach to writing instruction where you mentor students using your own writing-even if you don't consider yourself a writer. Inside Writing is a practical, flexible three-part program that gives you numerous entryways for learning how to model the central elements of the craft: <ul>
<li>topic choice</li> <li>rereading</li> <li>details</li> <li>response</li> <li>conventions</li> <li>the writing life</li> </ul>
Begin with any aspect of Inside Writing, and you'll discover new insights about high-quality writing instruction. Online Resources: go inside real classrooms to watch as teachers from grades 2-6 demonstrate their writing process for students, and hear teachers and students share what a difference this teaching technique makes; hear commentary tracks from Graves and Kittle that underscore important instructional moments; listen in as the authors discuss their own writing processes; and print seventy-eight quick-writes prompts. Book: read about the voluminous research that supports the efficacy of the apprenticeship method for teaching children to write; strengthen the link between instructional theory and your own day-to-day classroom-teaching practices; and gain a new understanding of the role of writing in both your students' lives and yours. My Quick Writes notebook: Use Graves' favorite Quick Write topics to practice your own writing and reflect on it; find prompts for in-class quick writes with children that prepare them for timed testing situations without giving over your writing workshop to mere test prep; and make connections between your writing process and your students'. Sharpen your writing instruction by learning to trust your own writing. Then teach your students in a powerful, lasting way that will help them to not only understand the elements of writing, but also to combine them into better finished products. Apprentice yourself to Donald Graves and Penny Kittle and go Inside Writing.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kittle, Penny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kittle, Penny

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kittle, Penny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Public Teaching: One Kid at a Time

The Greatest Catch: A Life in Teaching

Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft

Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing

The Digital Writing Workshop

Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers

Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts

Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing

180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents

Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft