In Making Conversation, Mark Larson reinvents his own teaching by raising difficult questions at the heart of the English classroom: Should we have a canon? If we should, who will decide what will be in it and how will they make that decision? How do we balance student choice with our responsibility to lead students to higher ground? How do we assess student progress in ways that yield useful, reliable information and are fair to all students? How do we reach disengaged students without compromising standards? What are our standards? And most important, What is English class?

Larson visits these and many other questions in full view of his colleagues, administrators, and students. He writes open letters to faculty and students in which he explores doubts about his own work as a teacher, his successes and failures in the classroom, his questions about the educational system, and his ideas on how to handle some of the more perplexing dilemmas today's teachers face. His colleagues and students reply with ideas and questions of their own. This book will lead teachers (preservice and inservice), administrators, and education professors to reflect on their own systems, their own teaching methods, the ways they assess student work, and their hope and expectations for their students.