Writing Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions (SUNY Press, available November 2009) is a response to teachers’ requests for guidance in how to make writing a central part of their pedagogy. By guidance, we understand conversations with writers and teachers who have traveled the same road from “strategy to practice,” keeping in mind the questions, “how can I change?” “What classroom culture will support that change?”

The question implied in the book's eight chapters is “Why write?” What difference does writing make in teaching, learning, and in the community of school? Questions about how to teach are not new, but the weight that teachers give to writing suggests not only that literacy is has become a more pressing problem, but that writing is valued for the ways in which it enriches and enlivens thinking. Writing-based teaching, described in different ways in these chapters, slows us down and makes us better listener and readers of others’ texts and of our own, and more reflective teachers.

Taken together, the essays represent an intellectual and pedagogical map through the composing process and the uses of writing to learn. The final chapter tells the story of IWT. Writing, the importance of community and collaboration, and IWT’s history are intertwined with the term practice.

To order a copy, visit: http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61912 or contact Trish Fleming, Assistant Director of IWT, at fleming@bard.edu or 845-758-7383 (while supplies last, the IWT office has heavily discounted hard-bound copies).