"If you're ultimately helping students become creative individuals with a voice; fluent, context-aware experts with language; and engaged and thinking adults, we think you're doing your job as a writing teacher (above and beyond what the standards-of-the-week have to say on the matter)."

"To teach writing well, we don't look someplace 'out there' for rules, formulas, and mimicry," write Dawn Latta Kirby and Darren Crovitz. "We begin, instead, by teaching students to attend to their inner language, to their individual sensations, perceptions, emotions, incipient understandings, observations, and perspectives. Writing, like all other acts of creation, develops from the inside out."

In this highly practical guide filled with a wealth of activities for the classroom, Dawn and Darren continue the long-standing tradition of earlier editions of Inside Out with guidance for building a community of writers, providing innovative and effective strategies for meeting kids where they are and coaching them to write with passion and purpose across all genres. Readers will relish the somewhat irreverent tone that fans of earlier editions have come to expect. Dawn and Darren's updates and revisions in this edition speak directly to today's teacher, offering:

• new strategies and suggestions that incorporate technology in meaningful ways and speak to today's tech natives in terms they understand
• guidance for working with English language learners and their writing
• inventive, reality-based approaches to research
• options for using nonfiction and nontraditional texts in your teaching
• a fresh take on the importance of authentic literacy education, especially in the age of the high-stakes testing and the Common Core
• real-world wisdom and strategies for teaching writing from a team of middle and high school teachers.

From theory to practice, this comprehensive text has everything you'll need to engage your students and get them writing from the inside out.

Dan Kirby is the coathor of New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007), Inside Out, Third Edition (2004), and Mind Matters (1991). A former high school English teacher, Dan recently retired after more than thirty years of university teaching at the University of Georgia, the University of Central Florida, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado at Denver.