During the pandemic, I partnered with a team of teachers at a Brooklyn middle school to develop a month-long memoir unit for remote instruction. I facilitated the design process and translated the team’s instructional expertise into a complete, ready-to-teach unit with twenty lessons, mentor texts, and a standards-based rubric. The unit was subsequently shared with schools across Brooklyn.
The design challenge had two dimensions. Students were learning remotely during a highly disruptive year, so the unit needed to sustain engagement and provide meaningful reasons to write. At the same time, the instructional approach needed to remain grounded in the teachers’ own expertise; my role was to surface that knowledge and translate it into a coherent curriculum.
The unit was grounded in a shared instructional principle: writing involves a series of decisions, and students improve when those decisions are named, modeled in authentic texts, practiced, and applied in their own work.
Study the model · Identify the craft move · Practice · Apply · Revise with purpose
