Creating Confident Writers: For High School, College, and Life

Writing should be for an audience other than a teacher, and for a purpose beyond getting a grade.

Connecting their classroom experience to research about writing, as well as to framing documents in the field, two seasoned writing teachers distill the lessons they’ve learned about creating confident adolescent and young adult writers. Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn outline a fundamental stance to their approach―to invite, encourage, and celebrate students’ writing―that is then echoed in the book’s three-part structure. There are numerous classroom activities and assignments on topics from creating writing goals to supporting revision, examples of student work, and questions to guide teachers’ reflections.

In this book for any teacher of writing, from middle school through college, readers are invited to try strategies and allow students’ voices to emerge, while discussing with colleagues how these approaches might work for them, too.

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Troy Hicks is a professor of English  and education at Central Michigan University. He directs both the Chippewa River Writing Project and the Master of Arts in Learning, Design & Technology program. A former middle school teacher, Dr. Hicks is an ISTE Certified Educator and regularly leads workshops related to writing and technology for schools, districts, and professional organizations.

Andy Schoenborn is an award-winning author and high school English teacher in Michigan at Mt. Pleasant Public Schools. He s a co-facilitator of the monthly #TeachWrite Twitter chat, past president of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, and a Regional Representative of the Michigan Reading Association. Schoenborn is also a contributing author of Using Technology to Enhance Writing (Solution Tree, 2014) and Continuing the Journey 2 (NCTE, 2018). In November 2019, he was honored with the 2019 Linda Rief Voices from the Middle Award for outstanding publication for his article, "Reclaiming the Arts in English Language Arts." He is a teacher consultant for the Chippewa River Writing Project (NWP) site.