Speaking Topics
- Using 100-word stories to amplify the ELA classroom
- Creating a Writing Workshop using essential questions and non-prescriptive feedback
- Fiction elements to amplify academic writing (the power of specificity in storytelling!)
- Writing is Revising. Creating an active revision culture through flash/micro forms
- Let them read trash! Why self-choice in reading promotes personal agency in the ELA classroom (it’s not what they read, but how they read)
Speaker Profile
Kim Culbertson holds an M.S. in Education, an MFA in Fiction, and has been teaching high school creative writing and English since 1997. She is the award-wining author of five YA novels. Her titles Catch a Falling Star, The Possibility of Now, and The Wonder of Us were Scholastic book club selections. She has won the Northern California Book Award for YA fiction and has been named a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. Kim sits on the Writers Council for National Writing Project and works as a Fiction mentor with Dominican University of California’s MFA in Creative Writing. With 100-Word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing, Kim has finally found a way to blend her two professional loves, teaching and writing, into one book. This work has transformed her classroom and her own writing—she would love to share their potential with you.
Grades: 5–12
“I have been teaching language arts since 1997 and I have rarely seen a form that my students have responded to quite like the 100-word story. Perhaps, it’s the attention spans of this internet-heavy time that make these flash stories so appealing, but I think it’s more than that. I think it goes back to the concept of scaffolding I learned in my credential program all those years ago — that idea that when we make something accessible and successful for our students, they respond in kind and apply it to other learning. These small, bright things contain entire worlds, and sharing these worlds with my students has been a bridge to their engagement in larger, more expansive ones.” - Kim Culbertson
