Creative Writing

Ms. Colwell is a creative writing teacher at Fort Collins High School. I sat in on one of her classes
and observed a lesson on writing using third person, third person omniscient and using different voices.
The concepts were taught using an interactive lecture that incorporated Power Point. The Power Point
provided definitions of the writing style terms as well as examples of each style. The examples were
often humorous or dramatic passages from famous novels. Ms. Colwell read the excerpts to the class in
a way that gave life to the text and demonstrated how it should be read properly. Between slides, she
would pause, allow for thoughts to digest, and then ask students a series of questions about the text,
What is the narrator telling us about the situation? and What voice does the author use? and How
do you know? This process made the lesson feel more like a class discussion than a lecture. By reading
the text in a way that drew the class in and by using humor, Ms. Colwell kept the class engaged. She had
no issue with participation or misbehaving. The class seemed to take on her relaxed demeanor as well as
her very apparent love for literature.