Topic: A Teacher's Guide to Mentor Texts

What can we learn from the texts that we admire the most? How can they inform our own writing?

Watch Carl Anderson demonstrate how to help students learn to read like writers.

Mentor texts provide concrete examples of craft techniques and conventions to refer to during mini-lessons, small group lessons and writing conferences.

Students learn about writing, even when they’re not in a writing workshop—by finding and studying their own mentor texts.

Mentor texts from a variety of high-interest sources along with diverse authors can be a real game changer in secondary writing classrooms. 

Watch a FREE planning video and download a FREE study guide from Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell, coauthors of A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts.

It helps to start small. A beautifully crafted sentence is filled with interesting decisions the writer has made, and there’s so much to learn.

We can prepare our students for academic writing tasks when we invite them to make the kind of writing real writers make.