Teaching Life

Stories from the Teaching Life with Penny Kittle
Penny Kittle shares insightful, inspiring essays about teaching and life that she has written and collected in her years as an educator. They will move you and inspire you, and they will remind you of the beauty of living the teaching life.
Penny Kittle is an English teacher, literacy coach, and director of new teacher mentoring at Kennett High School in North Conway, New Hampshire and has served as the National Council of Teachers of English Policy Analyst for the State of New Hampshire.
In 2009, she received the James N. Britton award from the National Council of Teachers of English for Write Beside Them. And, in 2015, she was recognized with the Exemplary Leader Award from the Conference on English Leadership.
Penny is the author of several books, and she recently co-edited (with Tom Newkirk) a collection of Don Graves’ work, Children Want to Write: Don Graves and the Revolution in Children’s Writing.

teaching life

Penny is the author of 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents (coauthored with Kelly Gallagher), Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers, Write Beside Them: risk, voice, and clarity in high school writing; and most recently, 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents, co-authored with Kelly Gallagher;Inside Writing: how to teach the details of craft & My Quick Writes (co-authored with her mentor and friend, Donald H. Graves), The Greatest Catch: a life in teaching, and Public Teaching: one kid at a time. She co-edited (with Tom Newkirk) a collection of Don Graves’ work, Children Want to Write: Don Graves and the Revolution in Children’s Writing.

She was a columnist for Voices from the Middle, an NCTE publication, for six years.

Penny’s writing has been featured in ASCD’s Educational Leadership, The Colorado Reading Council Journal, The Manitoba ASCD Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, California English, Scholastic, and Ohio State University’s Adolescent Literacy in Perspective Journal.