Thoughts from NCTE 25 – Dream Boldly

Attending NCTE 25 in Denver added another state to my list of states visited. No snow in Denver but the temperatures were perfect for walking a few blocks between my hotel and the convention center. 

NCTE is my rejuvenation trip as a teacher, a reader, and a writer every year. The convention is scheduled the weekend before Thanksgiving each year. Processing the experience each year takes a little time, and then the holidays and end of semester delay writing about it. 

As I review my notes, I’ll share what I learned, what I affirmed, and what I want to explore or experiment with in 2026.

College Section Luncheon – John Warner

Posted January 8, 2025

I have been slowly reading Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities for a while. I say slowly because the book makes me reflect constantly about my own classroom practice–past, present, and future. The sheer number of tabs I have is evidence of my reflection and need to retrieve information. 

The key to Warner’s appeal for me is that he’s fighting against that same standardization and formulaic writing I fought against during my time in secondary classrooms. 

His luncheon speech focused on AI as a test of our values, with several links to articles announcing the end of the humanities that have appeared in recent years. (Key points from the session are in italics.)

• What is Writing? Thinking, feeling, experiencing, connecting
• Why should we teach writing? 
  • We know how to teach it.
  • We don’t know how to teach AI.
• Writing is a rich experience.
  • Writing helps students think, feel, experience, and connect in a world that is too artificial. 
• AI exploits the transactional nature of school.
  • If the purpose of school is simply the completion of tasks, then students, parents, and others who defend student use of AI in assignments as a relevant real-world skill have a valid argument. This, however, exposes that school needs a dramatic shift to learning and development of knowledge and skills rather than a specific grade or score on a standardized test. 
  • What is the difference between students learning skills using AI and using AI to simplify or speed up tasks we already know how to do well? Students never develop the analytical level of thinking necessary to evaluate what AI produces. When I use AI to generate teaching materials or analyze a text, I already know what a useful instructional tool or reasonable analysis will look like and can evaluate and revise as needed. Part of explaining this difference to students is to be transparent about when and how I use it. 
• What should we be teaching? Building capacity to read, embrace friction, and discernment.

See Warner’s reflections on the convention here. You can find his blog at https://substack.com/@biblioracle. 

Check out books on my Bookshop.org shelf referenced at NCTE or that are part of my book haul.

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Moving Writers from Compliance to Engagement with Kelly Gallagher

Posted January 2, 2026

Beginning the conference with Kelly Gallagher is a treat. I’ve read his works and attended his sessions for years. His work has influenced my classroom and leadership practice. (Key points from the session are in italics.)

• It’s not so much what we write but that we write everyday.

Writing everyday is a habit to develop in the classroom and personally, a New Year’s resolution I may be able to keep. 

• The best teacher of writing is the writing. 

Teaching writing to meet a test expectation is not the way to develop writers. Writing needs to take many forms and achieve different purposes. Developing writers should be the bulk of what we do in the English classroom. Helping students navigate a particular standardized test should be a much smaller part of our teaching time. I always told students that any standardized test is 50% skills & knowledge and 50% understanding how the test works and what it expects. I can teach test strategy in a few weeks. Unfortunately, too many ELAR classrooms spend the majority of the time teaching to the test. 

• They must write considerably more than we will read to assess or provide feedback.

This is hard for many teachers because we are convinced that if we don’t grade it or give feedback, students won’t do it. This is true to a degree because of the transactional nature we’ve created in our classroom by holding points, grades, and passing as the reason for learning and practicing skills. A culture shift to learning and developing real skills as a reader, writer, and thinker benefits students and teachers. 

• Gallagher recommends a variety of daily prompts he calls provocations.
  • Write for 10 minutes.
  • Daily flash revision for 1 minute (replace, add, delete, reorder)
  • Model craft moves and grammatical rules
  • Combine sentences
  • They write 10, he reads 1 that they choose

I already include journaling in a composition book or spiral at the start of class. I want to add the flash revision by having them skip lines as they write to show revision. I can then model from my writing a craft move or combining sentences. I’m thinking that they write 3, I read 1 in my 8-week courses and they write 6, I read 1 in my 16-week courses. I wonder about having them do a 1-2 minute video about what they wrote and what they want me to see in their writing that they selected for me to read. Hopefully, this will build reflection and metacognition about what they are trying as a writer. 

• Exemplars and passage study leads to emulation. 
  • Blow up a printout on butcher paper for students to analyze together. When students are asking how long it has to be, they don’t know what it looks like. 
  • Think of a drone view construction.

I use several texts that are rich in stylistic devices for students to imitate, especially in Comp I. It’s low-stakes practice with syntactical and language moves that often show up in student essays because they see purposeful use of language. I’ve used columns by Leonard Pitts and other pieces that I’ve been introduced to at conferences like “Meatloaf Is Terrible. Fight Me.” by Joel Reese. I want to try the enlarged version of exemplars this coming semester for students to analyze text with partners.  

• Feedback and reflection move writers forward.
  • The Story of My Thinking: What I used to think … but this happened …, so now I think. 
  • From a Daniel Pink Pinkcast – Ask for advice (partner) not feedback (critic).
  • Feedback goal: Everyone improves.
  • Mid-Process: Think of it as a halftime not post game analysis. For peer response, teach how to give targeted responses (e.g., I wonder, I notice).
  • From Maja Wilson and Reimagining Writing Assessment: Accept the paper first. 

Metacognition or reflection during the writing process is an ongoing area of improvement for me this upcoming semester. I have adapted a form from Marcus Luther of The Broken Copier on Substack that he discusses in this post. Consistently using the form and incorporating progress checks and exit tickets will be my goals this spring. The peer feedback ideas are similar to my current practices. 

Sidenote: He mentioned the current book club selection he and Penny Kittle are reading: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney.

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