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A "Letter to the Editor" unit led to students publishing in national newspapers.
I'm always touched by the effect that first publication has on beginningwriters. . . . There is a new confidence, a new identity. They have made something that was not here before; they have spoken in their own voice and they have been heard. They are writers.
-DONALD M. MURRAY, A WRITER TEACHES WRITING (61)
In December 2019, I was about to join my colleagues for lunch when three of my students burst back into the classroom. One of them, Riya, seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilation. With a trembling hand, she held out her cell phone.
" The New York Times got back to me!" she exclaimed.
Then, I began to hyperventilate. My eleventhgrade students had submitted letters to the editors of The Washington Post and The New York Times in the past three years, but Riya's was the first to get a response from The New York Times.
Two weeks later, Riya's letter was published in the Sunday edition. Not bad for a fifteen-year-old writer.
My experience with students writing letters to the editor is not unique. Researchers have documented lessons in their own classrooms (Kahn) and those of others (Lundgren) that focus on students writing letters to the editor as practice, without submitting them for publication. Other teachers have successfully taught students to write and submit letters to the editor, many of which were published in local and regional newspapers. The resulting academic articles examined their pedagogies with a focus on authentic writing (Gogan; Hallman) and its effect on students' senses of efficacy (Dean; Gogan).
But the effects of my three-year journey with student writers were significant, and there are several takeaways from my Letter to the Editor unit that I believe are worth sharing with teacher colleagues. First, writing letters to the editor prepared my students to write longer argumentative essays, which was my original intent behind the unit. Second, writing and submitting letters to the editor for publication helped to build students' identities as argumentative writers. That is, through writing and submitting letters to the editor, students developed their identities as people who use writing to advance arguments, and whose writing and arguments are...