Articles
Here is where you’ll find all the latest print features from our contributors. If you’d like to browse specifically by grade level, topic, or contributor, you can use the links in the right sidebar.
Latest Content
What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About . . . ?
Ruth Shagoury and Melanie Quinn asked their colleagues to share the “most beautiful thing” about the puzzling student each of them is looking at closely in their study group. This is a great activity if you’re looking for a quick and easy icebreaker to spark some positive energy in your next study group or staff meeting and to remind everyone of the joys of our profession.
Helping Kids Lead Every Day: Differentiate with Precision
Tammy Mulligan shares three ways to precisely differentiate small-group instruction. This is the third installment of a three-part series.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Flexibility in Tool Creation
Sometimes, we ask students to conform to tools that we’ve already created or have found success with when working with former groups of students. However, one size does not fit all. Melissa Quimby shows us how we can be inspired by moments of productive struggle and consider how to help a tool fit our students rather than the other way around.
How to Intensify an Intervention
What happens when students’ reading data takes a downward trend? Dana Murphy encourages us to be confident and intensify a reading intervention with three practical moves.
Helping Kids Lead Every Day: How to Deepen Small-Group Discussions
Tammy Mulligan shares the step-by-step process she uses with her fourth-grade students so that their small groups are fully managed by students and her teaching is focused on their needs as readers. This is the second installment of a three-part series.
Vertical Conversations to Create Coherence
Jodie Bailey shows how representations and models help students understand complex math concepts. By participating in vertical conversations, teachers can strengthen our own understandings of skill progressions and help students develop essential connections and deeper understandings.
Building Thinking Classrooms in Literacy
Inspired by Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, David Pittman applies instructional practices to get students thinking for themselves as readers and writers, and to be drivers, not consumers or mimickers of someone else’s way of doing things.
Got Criteria? How to Help Students Engage with Success Criteria
Heather Fisher offers four tips for engaging our youngest students with daily criteria for success.
Booklist: Count Kindess In
It’s easy for students to forget to show kindness, especially in the gray days of winter. Joanne Emery shares a powerful picture book called Two Sandals, Four Feet by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed and illustrated by Doug Chayka. She includes a list of additional titles to inspire kindness in your classroom all year long. If you love discovering new books, you’ll appreciate this list!
Giving Kids Time and Space to Show Their Brilliance
Mallory Messenger suggests three instructional moves to provide time and space for students to show their brilliance. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to position students to learn.
Harnessing the Power of Words
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share three quick ways to increase vocabulary exposure in middle school. They also offer a summary of the importance of vocabulary development that inspires the urgency of vocabulary instruction.
Writing to Learn
Leigh Anne Eck shares how her middle school moved away from essay writing in all content areas and prioritized three writing strategies: sentences, summaries, and quick-writes as low-stakes writing tasks.
Whole-School Animal Research
Gigi McAllister shares an annual school-wide research project she leads in the library. You’ll be inspired by the way a focus on research can bring joy and belonging to all students in all grades.
Feedback Writers Will Use
Vivian Chen offers insights into the conditions needed to help writers value feedback. She discusses written and verbal feedback, as well as AI-generated feedback.
Shared Writing with Older Readers and Writers
Mandy Robek explored using shared writing experiences in her third-grade classroom and discovered it offered many rich literacy learning opportunities.
Now What? We Went on a Field Trip
Mandy Robek thoughtfully connects a field trip to multiple literacy experiences in her second-grade classroom. If you’re looking to leverage the field trip experience for reading and writing, you’ll love Mandy’s process.
Uplifting Independent Reading in the Living Room
Gwen Blumberg offers ways to make the library a welcoming space for readers to settle in with their choice of books. Classroom teachers can consider creating a living room, too.
Mentor Texts Elevate Readers and Writers
Bitsy Parks uses mentor texts to elevate her students as writers. Although mentor texts are included in many curriculum programs, Bitsy offers more opportunities for students to use mentor texts to strengthen their reading and writing lives.
Writing About Reading: A Search for Authenticity
In this powerful essay, Leigh Anne Eck challenged herself to read a complex text and discover the authenticity of writing about reading. She transferred her experience to create meaningful opportunities for her students as they write about their own independent reading.
Quick and Easy Reading Responses
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills offer three ways for students to write a quick and meaningful response inspired by their independent reading.
Sketchnoting in the Library
Gigi McAllister shares how she helped her students get started with sketchnoting during read aloud time. Perhaps like Gigi you aren’t a natural at this format, but you’ll be inspired by the value and ease of introducing this powerful note-taking technique.
Fostering Classroom Dialogue
Gretchen Schroeder shares her big takeaways from reading Inspiring Dialogue. Now more than ever, we need to help students express themselves and claim their voices, because the classroom is one of the last places where we can engage in dialogue about big questions with those who might not share our beliefs.
Meaning Makers
Josie Stewart and Hannah Tills push against the adage that “early readers are focused solely on learning to decode, while later readers are making meaning.” Instead they remind us of the beautiful way all readers are meaning makers.
Zooming In and Stepping Back
Gretchen Schroeder creatively leads her students in chronicling key scenes from a novel so they can evaluate which ones are important and use it as a reference throughout their discussions.
I Was Wrong About…
Gretchen Schroeder invited her students to write personal essays inspired by the 2022 New York Times series “I Was Wrong About.” Gretchen shared with her students (and with us) the way she was wrong about her mammy collection.
Alternatives to a Literary Essay: Two-Voice Perspective Poems
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills offer an alternative to writing a literary essay for middle school students. Providing alternative ways to discuss and demonstrate understanding about reading can be a welcome break from an essay for both students and educators, with valuable learning still taking place.
Delving Deeper Through Inquiry-Based Learning
Jodie Bailey suggests using books, pictures, or examples to begin or increase inquiry-based learning in your classroom. Using an example of learning more about pi from her classroom, Jodie offers ways to help students deepen their learning in any content area.
Girls’ Sports Books
Leigh Anne Eck noticed a gap in her library when it came to books with athletic female protagonists. After discovering many titles to add to her own library, Leigh Anne compiled this booklist so we can all fill this gap in our classroom libraries.
Literacy Skills in All Content Areas
Julie Cox reminds us that each content area is full of opportunities for students to give shape to their ideas in all kinds of ways that don’t look like traditional essays but still help them develop their literacy skills.
Leading with Empathy in the Classroom
Melissa Quimby offers profound advice for what to do when we notice inattention, excessive questioning, frozen learners, or disruptive behaviors. She recommends letting empathy lead our next steps.
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