Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Helping Students Navigate Unfamiliar Genres

2010 James N. Britton Award winner from the Conference on English Education (CEE) of the National Council of Teachers of English.

This work is an important contribution to the field of writing instruction, but it is also a great read. The advice is practical, the resources helpful, and the discussion thought provoking. Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan are wonderful guides on the journey through the Unfamiliar Genre Project…they invite us in, earn our trust, and then support us as we take on a new and unfamiliar challenge. Enjoy the journey! Heather Lattimer
Author of Thinking Through Genre

If genre study isn’t in your curriculum and standards documents, it’s likely to be soon. But which genres are the most useful for students to study? And how do you find time to cover them all? Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone answers these questions. It shows how immersing students in one genre that they aren’t familiar with helps them understand the concept of genre in general and strengthens their reading and writing.

In Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone Cathy Fleischer and Sarah Andrew-Vaughan present the Unfamiliar Genre Project. Through this extended reading and writing sequence, your students will discover the skills to be savvy in any genre, and you’ll find ways to support them. The Unfamiliar Genre Project helps you:

• develop students‘ thinking about writing fundamentals such as purpose, audience, form, topic selection, and word choice
• support adolescents’ test-taking abilities by increasing their awareness of the genre characteristics of test writing
• fully engage students by connecting school writing to their outside interests
• truly integrate the English curriculum by studying genre from the points of view of both readers and writers.

Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan give you highly detailed, specific ideas for teaching the Unfamiliar Genre Project. Their organizational structures, lessons, and variations for classrooms in different settings will help you plan and implement the project with ease.

Read Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone and teach the Unfamiliar Genre Project. You’ll soon discover how to boost students’ achievement in every genre as they study just one.

Cathy Fleischer is coauthor of the Heinemann title Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone. A former high school English teacher, she is a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. She has edited NCTE’s English Education and codirects the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, coordinating the teacher research group and the Family Literacy Initiative. Cathy presents frequently and writes extensively about how teachers can create change by conducting classroom research and sharing it with colleagues, administrators, and parents.