Catching Tigers in Red Weather: Imaginative Writing and Student Choice in High School

All good writing is creative. But it’s easy to forget this when writing is used mainly as a tool to assess reading comprehension and writers are judged by how well they conform to prescribed standards of proficiency.

Teacher-poet Judith Rowe Michaels describes how she refocused her ninth-grade English course to help students explore writing - their own and the assigned literature - as an art form with the same potential for creativity as, say, Web design, filmmaking, or music. Expanding their writing repertoire, students discover that to be memorable, a poem, essay, or story requires imagination, a sharp eye, a tuned ear, an engaged but open mind, and an interest in language, structure, and pace. As they draft, students create class criteria for revising, assessing, and grading each new piece and gradually realize they are all in training to catch their tiger - a free-choice, three-week writing project.

How Michaels’s students engage with their free-choice project, incorporating lessons learned from writing in response to literature, illustrates the importance of creativity to writing in all genres. If you’re looking for ways to motivate your young writers, this book is a doorway into the classroom of a master teacher who invites all of us to rediscover what reading and writing should always do - stretch our imaginations.