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Creating a Teacher Notetaking System

Dana Murphy, a reading specialist, guides all teachers in ways to develop a notetaking system that works perfectly because it is personalized.

It’s Time to Admire: Sharing in the Beauty of Students’ Writing

Heather Fisher shares a process to help teachers learn to admire student writers and find the beauty in their work.

Level Two Unlocked: Using the Language of Video Games to Engage Students in the Assessment Experience

Heather Fisher considers the research behind gamified experiences and applies it to a lengthy first-grade phonics assessment. Heather challenges us to gamify assessments to maintain the integrity of the assessment while increasing student engagement.

One-Page Reading Response: A Simple Approach to Complex Assessment

Christy Rush-Levine uses one-page reading responses as a simple culminating activity to provide closure for book clubs. However, the data they offer about readers is far from simple.

Getting to Know Digital Learners: How Playing with Technology Helps Facilitate Our Identities as Learners

As teachers we do many things to get to know our students as readers and writers and mathematicians. Josie Stewart and Hannah Tills lead us to consider how to get to know our students as digital learners.

Student-Planned End-of-Year Celebration

Josie Stewart and Hannah Tills know the end of the school year is full, yet they take the time to reflect and celebrate what learners have built throughout the year by asking students to create a plan for a final celebration.

Creating Progressions to Meet Learners Where They Are

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share how to create and use learning progressions to support students in deepening their understanding of theme. Download a copy of a theme progression.

Mining the Data

Heather Fisher shares how to rebrand data meetings as mining meetings to turn anxiety and frustration into actionable and meaningful responses to data.

Making Data Review More Personal

Dana Murphy describes an approach to “data-review days” that looks beyond numbers to the faces of kids and talks about all kids in all of their humanity.

Student-Created Assessments

Ruth Metcalfe releases responsibility to her first-grade class to create formative assessments and take ownership in their learning.

Grow and Innovate with Reflection

Julie Cox makes a case for reflection as an essential tool for growth and innovations. She shares simple and powerful practices that will allow all educators to continue to deepen their instructional practices.

Formative Assessment From Share Sessions

Ruth Ayres outlines different kinds of share sessions and different formats for the share, including some that take advantage of technology.

How to Use Students’ Reading Logs as a Formative Literacy Assessment

Matt Renwick reminds us that there  is a lot of information available in our classrooms that can inform instruction. Some of it is “hiding in plain sight,” for example reading logs.

Reading Quiz

Gretchen Schroeder shares the way she adjusts her reading quizzes to assess students’ analysis and deep thinking about texts.

Rethinking Late-Work Policies

Gretchen Schroeder asks herself tough questions about her late-work policy for high school students. In the end, she changed her late-work policy and found that it took no effort on her part, other than a shift in mindset, while yielding powerful results.

From Seed to Blossom

Leigh Anne Eck provides a guide to developing an End-of-Year Reflection for students to consider their own growth, as well as offer advice regarding curriculum and instruction.

Assessing Students Online: Small and Powerful Moves

Tammy Mulligan shares small and mighty moves when assessing students online.

Learning Standards: No Best Way

Jen Schwanke provides some critical questions for teachers to ask when they are interpreting a standard and bringing it to life with students.

Data That We Can Trust

Matt Renwick finds the data closest to the students we serve is more helpful to teachers than many benchmarks or screener scores.

Navigating the Interpretation Process

Tammy Mulligan shares how she introduces students to the process of interpreting literature at different grade and developmental levels.

Observing Skilled Readers

Mark Levine wonders why his most some of his most skilled readers take the most time to get through texts. So he asks them, and gets some fascinating answers he uses to assist struggling students.

The Power of Teaching Journals

Bitsy Parks finds inspiration for her teaching journal in the work of Debbie Miller. She explains how she uses her journal daily, and how it has evolved over time.

Remembering the Big Picture in Reading Assessments

Kate Mills notes her own miscues in reading a bedtime story to her young children, and thinks about what that means for analyzing the running records of readers in primary classrooms.

Making Learning Stick: Learning Progressions and Student-Created Exemplars

Tammy Mulligan explains the process of having students analyze and create models of good writing and analysis for assessing themselves and peers.

Can a High-Stakes Assessment Create Readers?

Stephanie Affinito encounters an unexpected by-product of testing for her son—the uninterrupted reading time waiting for others to finish builds a good habit. She shares how teachers might reclaim 10 minutes a day for independent reading.

Teaching Constructed Response Before Exams

Teaching the genre of tests can seem far removed from writing workshop. Matt Renwick explores how to teach constructed response in a way that is integrated with the tenets of good workshop instruction.

Status of the Class: Reflecting on Reading Communities

Franki Sibberson uses status of the class each day as a window into her fledgling reading community.

A Better Status of the Class

Dana Murphy finds that adding numbers of pages to her status-of-the-class list for reading makes all the difference in assessing students’ growth and needs as readers.

Releasing the Teaching to Students

Mark Levine releases responsibility for teaching and assessment to students late in the school year, and hears echoes of learning from previous units.

Forming Groups Using a Planner

Dana Murphy explains how her small-group planner is an essential tool for organizing groups in her fourth-grade classroom.

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