Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose

The idea that students should be "college and career ready" when they leave high school has become a major focus in education, but much of this conversation has been on reading readiness. What about writing readiness?

Liz Prather argues that we can set students up for future success when we help them learn to care about what they're writing, and help them manage their time to write. "I needed a framework for teaching writing that would keep my students accountable and engaged," Liz explains, "but would allow them to write from their own passions, and instill in them an understanding of time management, goal setting, and production. By adding the tenets and practices of project-based learning, I could simultaneously protect the creative processes of my students while helping them learn to manage long term writing projects, the kind of projects they would be doing in college or in a career."

Project-Based Writing provides a 7 step structure to conceive, manage, and deliver writing projects built upon student voice and student choice. Liz includes classroom-tested strategies for helping kids persevere through roadblocks, changes in direction, failed attempts, and most importantly, "anticipate the tricks of that wily saboteur, Time." Both practical and inspirational, Project-Based Writing teaches kids the real-world lessons they need to become real-world writers.

"With this book, you will quite likely become the person students remember as the one who taught them how to write."--Cris Tovani

Liz Prather is a writing teacher at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a gifted arts program at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. A classroom teacher with 21years of experience teaching writing at both the secondary and post-secondary level, Liz is also a professional freelance writer and holds a MFA from the University of Texas-Austin. Liz is the author of Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose, and Story Matters: Teaching Teens to Use the Tools of Narrative to Argue and Inform.