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How to Promote Civil Discourse in Your Classroom

Matt Renwick shows how to build the capacity of all students to engage in civil discourse.

Navigating the Election Season Booklist

Mandy Robek shares a booklist inspired to give students background about U.S. presidential elections.

Patterns of Prompting

We spend our days prompting whole groups, small groups, and individual learners. We’ve all been in situations where we may not have known what to say. Melissa Quimby offers advice on how to be educators who use language brimming with curiosity and encouragement.

Indoor Walks

Gigi McAlister discovered that using indoor walks is a way to help students engage in their learning and strengthen their learning community through conversations.

Reclaiming Space: Weeding to Grow a Healthy Library

Books, like gardens, need to be tended to regularly for the whole library to thrive. Gigi McAllister gives tips for anyone in the weeding process for their school or classroom library.

I Don’t Hate Graphic Organizers

Vivian Chen challenges us to replace an overly prescriptive handout that dictates the contents of a paragraph or essay with more open-ended organizers and exemplars to help students plan and write with more independence.

Bit by Bit: Lifting the Level of Storytelling

Melissa Quimby shifts the way she helps students approach narrative writing by focusing on the conflict and encouraging students to unfold it bit by bit. This small shift lifts the level of the stories students write—you can try it, too!

Morning Hike

Gwen Blumberg helps us consider and create space for a variety of personalities and learning needs. Inspired by a morning hike, she takes her observations and applies them to give space for all students to learn.

A Poetic Beginning

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills use poetry to help students discover writing ideas. Inspired by three poems, students share their notebook entries and poems from the first days of a new school year.

Let’s Begin

Gwen Blumberg reflects on the community developed at a writing retreat and encourages teachers to consider the community of learners they will intentionally nourish this school year.

Fostering Reading Lives in the Library

Gigi McAllister fosters engaged reading lives through goal-setting in the library. She shares ways we can encourage all readers to have robust reading lives.

Story Walks

Christy Rush-Levine invites students into a story walk. While many of our school activities require students to sit still and be quiet, story walks with wordless books are a simple way to invite students to move and talk, with powerful outcomes.

Responding to Appeals for Help

Dana Murphy outlines three options to respond to a student who is stuck when reading and looking to the teacher for the answer. By being mindful when students appeal for help, we can make intentional, on-the-spot decisions to empower students to become better readers.

Purposeful Play

Jodie Bailey makes a case for purposeful play with her middle school students. To strengthen reading habits, we offer exposure to a wide variety of books, time to read, and opportunities to discuss ideas. In math classrooms students need similar opportunities to explore and play.

Your Voice Matters

Jodie Bailey shares a picture-book version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and then gives students time to reflect on the message. While math class might seem like an unusual place to help students consider their identity and place in the world, Jodie inspires teachers to offer space and time for students to find their voice…while making direct connections to math standards.

An Invitation to Elevate Readers’ Thinking Through Conversation

Melissa Quimby offers structures to help elevate readers’ thinking through book club conversations. You’ll love putting these practical ideas into play in your own classroom—and be awed by the depth of your readers’ understandings.

Teaching Students to Self-Monitor

Dana Murphy explicitly teaches students how to self-monitor through modeling and using an anchor chart that clearly defines each step.

Fostering a Love of Reading in All Students

Lisa Mazinas reminds us of the importance of fostering a love of reading in all students. She offers specific ways to reconnect students with the enjoyment of reading.

Know/Wonder Chart

Dana Murphy shares the power of a Know/Wonder chart to peek inside the minds of intermediate readers and provide direction beyond assessment data.

Building Vocabulary One Purple Word at a Time

Leigh Anne Eck shares one way to uplift word choice of middle school writers. Through a simple and responsive system, her students are growing their vocabulary, learning parts of speech, and taking risks with more sophisticated word choice. All you need is a purple highlighter and a willingness to celebrate student voices.

Let’s Do It Again, Together

Heather Fisher revisits a whole-school vocabulary routine that she set in motion. In this update, she shares the ways she adjusted to work together as a team rather than fly solo. This might be just the school-wide vocabulary routine you’ve been craving.

Building Bridges (and Confidence): Planning Solid Essays

Melissa Quimby offers time and intentional planning to build students’ confidence and capacity as essay writers.

Informational Poetry

Hannah Tills and Josie Stewart teach students to write informational poetry. They remind us that poetry can serve as a mentor text in many units and does not have to be siloed in its own unit.

Step Into Poetry: Building a Poetry-Conscious Classroom

Joanne Emery has curated a fabulous list of resources and ideas to build a poetry-conscious classroom community.

Weaving Words Throughout the School Year

Joanne Emery rounds up several ideas for embedding vocabulary routines in the school day. She also shares many rich vocabulary resources.

Empowering Students Through Thinking Routines

Jodie Bailey shares practical ways to nourish students’ thinking routines in her math classroom. She is inspired by Peter Liljedahl’s book Building Thinking Classrooms.

Big, Loud, and Slow: Six Strategies for Better Public Speaking

Matt Renwick worked with a speech therapist after having a stroke. Through this process, he realized powerful teaching points to help students become stronger public speakers.

When Reading Practices Drift

When Leigh Anne Eck noticed her students’ reading practices weren’t as robust as she expected, she realized she was the one who had drifted away from key instructional practices. Leigh Anne offers several ways to support students in their independent reading lives.

Kintsugi

Given an assignment to break a china bowl and rebuild it allowed Gretchen Schroeder to engage in the Japanese art of kintsugi. What surprised her were the lessons she learned about growth and innovation in her teaching practice.

Reclaiming Our Time

Vivian Chen gives four steps to adjusting a lesson from the teacher’s guide to reclaim your time and make the lesson more meaningful and engaging to students.

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