Episode 53: How Can We Help Our Students Find Their Voices in Their Writing? A Conversation with Kourtney Hake & Paige Timmerman

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2025!

In this first episode of 2025, Elizabeth is speaking with Kourtney Hake and Paige Timmerman about their recent book, Their Stories, Their Voices, which focuses on narrative writing and how to easily implement narrative writing units into your instruction.

Paige and Kourtney discuss how they define narrative writing and talk about how they structured this book. They really worked to make it possible to implement narrative writing as seamless as possible and without extra work. They give lots of examples from their own teaching and have excellent mentor texts for narrative writing. One of my favorite parts of our conversation is the discussion about how we as teachers can work with students to include their voices in all genres of writing - not only narratives.

For more ideas, check out Kourtney and Paige's book. You can find it here. It is a great resource to support your writing instruction in the new year!