Always Write

I'm a 30-year retired teacher as of August 2019! I taught reading and writing, speech and debate, journalism and technology, and I became Director of our local chapter of the National Writing Project for 7 years during my time in the classroom. I loved my time with the students.

In retirement, I am consulting with schools and districts, teaching online graduate-level classes for my Alma Mater, writing a book, and giving the ALWAYS WRITE and WRITINGFIX some much needed make-overs.

During my 30 years as a teacher, a teacher-trainer and an adjunct professor, I developed and taught dozens and dozens of professional workshops, and I helped schools create achievable long-term professional development goals for not only writing instruction but also for differentiated instruction, formative and summative assessment, Marzano, Tomlinson, Silver and Strong's strategies, as well as Understanding by Design.

I am currently available for conducting 1- or 2-day workshops at your school site or district. My professional development offerings currently focus on strategies for writing, reading, and vocabulary skills--especially at schools where "Writing Across the Curriculum" is seen as a valuable requirement of students to ensure they've truly learned and are able to explain ideas in their own words If you're interested in bringing me to your school, district, or state, contact me through email: corbett@corbettharrison.com

No worksheets! No low-level memorization of vocabulary lists! No lectures! Not sit-and-get or spray-and-pray dissemination of content! I simply cannot teach things at the bottom two levels of Bloom's taxonomy anymore without feeling horribly guilty inside. In the "depth versus coverage" educational world, I am all about the depth. We all must be.

In my classroom of 30 years, we "workshopped" everything we learned, including the boring things, like grammar and paragraphing. Each student learned to serve as a a valuable member of our classroom community, and each student was aware of his/her strengths and knew he/she was expected to give their all in my student-centered classroom.

I have won numerous honors over the years from both national and local organizations, but the best rewards I received took the form of my students' thank you cards at the end of each school year, their parents notes to me, and the kind emails from teachers who use my two sites (Always Write and WritingFix) send me. Here's one such note from last week from a teacher named Tiffany: "I am blown away by the phenomenal ideas on your site, your generosity in sharing, and all of the hard work I can see as an experienced teacher." Those words, to me, beats any certificate or plaque I can hang on my wall.

K-5th grades in Fresno, California.

6th-12th in Reno, Nevada.

I earned both my Bachelors and Master's Degree locally, from the University of Nevada-Reno, where I now work as an adjunct professor when an online class in one my specialty areas runs.

For seven years, I was lead instructor in 700-level graduate courses for teachers at our local university, and those were some of the best summers of my career because of the connections I made with amazing, local teachers. The best ideas for teaching I ever received came from actual teachers, not university lecturers, not textbooks.