The Tiny Lines Lessons Are Here

Picture a high school teacher on any ordinary Tuesday in the year of our Lord, two thousand twenty-six. They’re planted in front of a group of students that have absolutely no interest in the mandated curriculum that’s been imposed upon them. They have no interest in compounding that particular suffering and no time to adapt what’s been adopted without their input in order to serve them a tiny bit better. What they need is a bit of breathing room. A bit of time to push pause long enough to transform what isn’t working into something that just might. They could also use plans that are made for them but that also engage their students in a creative writing experience that will build their confidence and their pride in their own work.

Something as manageable as it is meaningful.

Something simple that inspires sophisticated craft moves.

Something as refreshing as it is rigorous.

That’s the teacher I kept in mind while I built the Tiny Lines lessons.

Some context: A few weeks ago, I promised to flip the first four of my Friday Tiny Lines Substack invitations into lesson plans for high school writing teachers. Those plans are finished now. And I want to say a little about how they are meant to work, because a few of my design choices were deliberate, and they may be easy to miss.

You can teach any one of these lessons on its own, in whatever order suits you, and nothing will feel like it is missing. You can also hang all four together into a mini-unit that unfolds across days or weeks, where each craft move builds on the one before it.

The plans share the same structure on purpose. Once you’ve taught one, the next will feel familiar to you, and your students will begin to carry a schema for how this multimodal writing process can go.

The making comes before the writing in every plan, by design. Writers represent the shape of a piece with materials before they ever transpose it into words, and that making is where much of the thinking happens. If a writer wants the finished piece to stay multimodal, that can be the product too.

I kept the plans light for a reason. They are built to slip inside any unit or resource featuring personal narrative. Borrow from them, retrofit them, and fold them into what you already use. I hope they add some grit and texture. Some value to what you already do. They can also hold their own.

Paid subscribers may access them on the other side of the paywall, along with an invitation to meet with me and dig into all of this more. See you on the other side.