Current and future educators have important perspectives to share about our schools, and the Educators Rising conference showed them how to bring their thoughts to a wider audience. At the Writing for Publication breakout session on Sunday, Teresa Preston, PDK International’s director of publications, shared tips for how they could develop an idea, choose potential publication venues, and refine their writing to make it more appealing to editors and audiences.

Some of the suggestions included:

• Decide on a goal. Do you want to persuade someone, provide information, entertain, or tug at the reader’s heartstrings?
• Understand who needs to hear your message. Is this a message specifically for your local community or for a larger audience? Is it something school leaders should consider, or do you want to convince the community beyond schools?
• Seek places where you can reach your audience. What kinds of publications does the audience read? What publications might be interested in your message and voice?
• Study the publication you’re interested in writing for. What kinds of articles do they publish? Do they accept articles from writers not on their staff? Are there submission guidelines on their website?
• Plan and refine your article. Open with a “hook” to get readers interested. Ask others to read your article and make suggestions about grammar and content before you send it in. Try reading the article out loud or reading it backward to catch mistakes.

Don’t take it personally if your articles aren’t published, Preston said. Editors receive many more articles than they can publish, and sometimes it’s just not the right time or place for your article. Writers may have more success with local newspapers and websites that publish opinion pieces from community members.

During the session, attendees thought through the kinds of stories they have to tell and who might benefit from hearing those stories. Together, they explored how they might write and submit their own opinion piece on the topic of teacher pay. And they were given an opportunity to write their own response to a question for Kappan’s Students Speak Up column.