# @edutopia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CM2LdwSDdzQ
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/20303884-edutopia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/bafd936d2c.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-03-25T15:21:25.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Edutopia (@edutopia) — https://gondola.cc/edutopia

## Caption

High school students aren’t necessarily to blame when they write “agonizingly boring” essays—sometimes that’s the “predictable result” of an unengaging assignment, English teacher Jori Krulder came to realize. ⁣
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After reading one such stack of cookie-cutter essays, Krulder decided it was time for a change. It took time and experimentation, but here’s how she now gets her students “engaged and creating writing that is a joy to read,” she writes. ⁣
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• Connect Work to Students’ Lives: “After 25 years of teaching, I’m still having epiphanies about how to engage students. One such realization is that if I want students to dig into anything I’m teaching in my classroom, I must find a way to help them connect it to something else they already know or care about,” Krulder notes. ⁣
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• Provide Real-Life Models and Choices: Krulder uses mentor texts to help students break down the structures and techniques used by professional writers in different kinds of published works so they can pick a few of these elements to use in their own writing. Krulder applies the technique to a unit in which  students listen to a variety of podcasts, analyze scripts, and then create their own episode. ⁣
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• Build Ownership: For an American Lit research paper, Krulder starts with an essential question: “What is the purpose of education, and how well is the U.S. fulfilling that purpose?” Students read a broad selection of texts—poems, essays, Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, Matt Groenig’s “School Is Hell” comics, and more. Then they conduct research and formulate their answer. “The resulting papers are refreshingly full of students’ own ideas and reasoning,” Krulder writes. ⁣
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With these stronger, more interesting assignments that create opportunities to “make real-life connections and choose what they will write about, my students astound me with their engagement in and ownership of the writing process, and reading their work is now a whole lot more rewarding,” Krulder observes.⁣

Link in bio.
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#Literacy #StudentEngagement #StudentVoice #ELA #EnglishLanguageArts #StudentVoice #HighSchoolTeacher

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## Tags

ela, literacy, studentvoice, studentengagement, highschoolteacher, englishlanguagearts

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