We were so grateful to have the opportunity to return to India for a second writing institute in October 2024! Participants joined us from Mumbai and Delhi and had a range of expertise spanning prekindergarten through twelfth grade! We were in awe of their eagerness to step into a learning role and engage in both writing and teaching practices at the institute. It was incredible to experience the trajectory of writing across the elementary years throughout high school. Knowledge of what comes before and after strengthens educators' ability to impact the wide range of learners in front of them in any given grade or stage of development.
As with our first Institute in Mumbai, held in February 2024 at the Columbia Global Center Mumbai, this institute could not have occurred without the support of Dalbir Kaur Madan. Delbir is the founder and lead educator at One Up Library, Bookstore Studio and Learning Lab. Her commitment to developing lifelong readers and writers and her vision for best literacy practices for all students has led to this growing collaboration between Teachers College Advancing Literacy and schools across India.
We are grateful to India Habitat Centre for hosting our learning. Their floral gardens and exquisite architecture provided a gorgeous backdrop, allowed us to recharge, and supported our learning.
This three-day institute centered on journalism, research-based opinion and argument writing, and graphic novels. Participants studied the structure, elaboration techniques, and craft of these genres through the use of mentor texts and developed coherent, explicit whole-class and small-group lessons. Oral rehearsal, multimodal writing, and writing conventions were featured as well as ways to harness AI for both teachers and students. Participants collaborated to plan for ways to bring best practices in writing into their curricula—IB, IGSCE, CBSE, and ICSE.
This institute was a powerful reminder to…
explore the kinds of writing that capture students’ attention, identify the ways it can strengthen students’ writing development, and incorporate it into your instruction.
build in opportunities to prepare for writing - research, debate, talk. That is, orally rehearse the characteristics and structures of the genre, the specific word choice, and the linguistic syntax - writing doesn’t begin when you put pen to paper, it begins with the budding of an idea and time to rehearse a first draft in the air, with a partner as the audience.
tap into the power of mentor texts - any type of writing can be within reach when you know how to mine a sample text inside a genre, and stylistically align yourself to creative techniques and clear goals. A few texts that we particularly enjoyed working with included Isabel Quintero’s My Papi Has a Motorcycle, Gene Luen Yang’s Dragon Hoops, and the Comics Squad series from Penguin Random House.
always keep learning and engaging the larger professional communities of literacy learning. Two texts we utilized across the days of learning included, The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing and Speaking for Change by Mary Ehrenworth, Marc Todd, and Pablo Wolfe. We relied upon this text to launch our work around research-based argument writing - it was important to acknowledge our biases, build background knowledge and read closely and critically before developing a stance and supporting it with strong evidence. The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler served as a guide for thinking through how to teach grammar and conventions instruction in meaningful and connected ways.
For all who engaged in our learning in New Delhi, we are inspired by your dedication and can’t wait to see how you take this learning back to your schools. We hope you will continue to share your learning with us and with each other and that we’ll see you again soon. Thank you, धन्यवाद.
Interested in learning with us at future institutes? Check out our upcoming Developing Early Literacy Skills through Play, Drama, and Songs Pre-K - K Institute in New York City in February and our Teaching Writing in Small Groups: Honing Instructional Practices, for Teachers and Literacy Coaches Institute in San Jose, CA in February.
Can’t make it to New York or California? We’d love to study with you online. We are currently enrolling in synchronous focused-topic courses on Using AI and Digital Literacies to Support Reading and Writing; Close Reading to support Decoding, Fluency, and Comprehension; Responsive Grammar and Conventions Instruction; and more as well as our asynchronous Foundational Reading Skills Modules.