How to Teach Writing with Digital Media
Dr. Sarah Levine taught secondary English in a Chicago public school for ten years, where she founded a youth radio program to make writing feel real to her students. She is now a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Executive Director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. In this episode she gives you the smallest possible version of an authentic audience — an audience of one — and it turns out that's enough.
Her students record a memory about someone they love and give it to that person as a gift. Levine's research found that kids revise just as hard for that one listener as they would for public radio. Strong verbs, no cliches, concrete images — every rule of good writing gets more important when there's nothing to look at.
This episode originally aired in 2021 and comes in at number six in our countdown of the top 10 episodes of the first 1,000.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why "who's going to read this besides you?" is the real writing problem
- How an audience of one produces the same revision effort as an audience of thousands
- The three-to-four week unit: listen, build criteria, draft, cut cliches, record
- Why writing for audio quietly enforces every rule of good writing
- Where to find free student-made audio stories to use as models
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e988
If you've got a student who writes nothing for you and everything for their friends, send them this idea — and send this episode to the English teacher down the hall.
