School Visits
Rick is available for day-long visits or extended residencies in elementary, middle, and high schools. His classroom presentations focus on a number of subjects, listed below. Rick will work closely with your school to tailor classroom presentations and professional development sessions to fit your specific needs. Students and teachers involved in Rick's sessions will be asked to write, and often to share their writing.
Presentation Topics:
- building strong narratives
- descriptive, expository, and persuasive essay writing
- preparing for writing assessments
- writing about literature
- writing across the curriculum
- developing subjects and topics for student writing
- self-questioning techniques for developing more specific and powerful sentences and paragraphs
- creating strong introductions, transitions, and conclusions
- other topics
A Typical Day
Rick teaches from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. A normal day includes four classroom presentations, and at least one professional development session for teachers and administrators. The most successful presentations happen in individual classrooms (or with no more than two combined classes of students) where students have been prepared by their teachers for Rick's visit and where the teachers themselves are actively engaged during the presentation. Rick also works with larger groups of students when necessary. See the sections below on "After-School Professional Development" and "Prompts, Grading Papers, and Student Conferences" for a description of other services Rick offers to schools and students.
Scheduling A Visit
Rick books visits up to a year ahead of time. Usually, the months of August through February fill up quickly each year. Contact Rick by emailing him at rick@rickshelton.us or by calling him at (205) 531-6193. A schedule of fees and expenses is available upon request.
Preparing For the Visit
- Designate a person to be your contact with Rick, who will communicate with all teachers involved about the upcoming visit. Provide Rick with the contact's email and phone number.
- Determine your school's needs for writing instruction and discuss possible topics for Rick's presentations.
- Contact Rick to discuss and determine topics, format, and schedule for the visit.
- Prepare students ahead of time for Rick's visit. Teachers typically highlight some aspects of Rick's biography and/or read sections from his chapter book Hoggle's Christmas or sample essays or stories from Write Where You Are.
- Students (and teachers) involved in Rick's sessions should have paper and pencil.
After-School Professional Development
Your school may want to extend Rick's visit to include an after-school session for teachers. Contact Rick to discuss hours and fees for this.
Prompts, Grading Papers, Student Conferences
Several schools have followed up Rick's visits with mock writing assessments or other assignments and contracted with Rick to grade students' writing with scores (according to the ADAW rubric) and comments. Rick has also spent school visits working with individual students in one-on-one conferences to discuss writing they have completed prior to Rick's visit. Rick will be happy to provide prompts for writing assessments or assigments.
Writer-in-Residence and Young Authors' Conferences
Rick can serve as a writer-in-residence or visiting author for your school's Young Authors' Conference. Rick reads and discusses his book, Hoggle's Christmas.
