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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.
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One Child, Many Stories
Asking the right questions of family members can get you far more valuable information than anything from an assessment, especially when you are dealing with English language learners. Stella Villalba explains why initial meetings with new families are crucial.
Spreading Love with Compliments
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills close out the year in their eighth-grade classroom with a compliments activity.
Summer Reading
Bitsy Parks reflects upon her own not-so-successful experiences as a parent in getting her four children to read during the summer months. She uses these parenting lessons to help students take the initiative for summer reading by writing down commitments and goals in her first-grade classroom.
Looking Forward with Students
Melanie Meehan uses reflective questions and video to build a library of materials at the end of the year to use with next year's class.
Puppy Chow
How do you know an assignment is authentic and worthy of your students' time? Suzy Kaback explains why you need to try it out yourself first.
Using Tech to Find Authentic Audiences for Student Writing
Matt Renwick discovers technology provides many authentic audiences for student writing.
Reimagining Reading Logs
Reading logs have fallen out of favor in many classrooms because they often become a rote activity for recording pages read. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills find authenticity with the logs comes when they move from emphasizing recording to goals and reflection.
Weeding a First-Grade Library
Bitsy Parks has a simple seven-step process for a hard day’s work of weeding out her first-grade classroom library.
Books on a Budget
There are scores of new children’s books that continually tempt teachers. But how do you stock your classroom library with a limited budget? Shari Frost shares proven strategies.
Managing Independent Projects
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills continue their series on independent projects with nuts and bolts advice on management.
Literacy and Global Competence
“China is going to kill us all!” This quote from a student causes Matt Renwick to stop and consider how schools can use literacy to promote global understanding.
A Year of Learning About Student Refugees
Did you know the average length of stay in a refugee camp is 17 years? That’s only one of the many astonishing facts Stella Villalba learned as she worked to learn more about the needs of the refugees in her school district.
A Variety of Share Sessions
Ruth Ayres catalogs her favorite types of share sessions (from old favorites to creative innovations) in writing workshops.
A Community Reads “Wonder”
Katherine Sokolowski had a dream — her whole community reading and celebrating the same book. She explains how she helped coordinate, organize, and purchase hundreds of books for a community-wide reading of Wonder.
The Writing Workout
Suzy Kaback meets with a group of teachers to talk through struggles in the writing workshops. Using a fitness analogy, they come up with strategies to try immediately in their classrooms.
Backward Chaining
How do you help students who are far behind their classmates in tackling writing projects, and have had years of learned helplessness in approaching complex tasks? Melanie Meehan takes on the challenge with a backward-chaining model.
Why We Like Independent Writing Projects
One way to get all students excited about writing workshop is through independent projects. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills explain why they devote many Fridays to independent projects. This is the first installment in a three-part series.
Eating Poetry
April is a month-long “thanksgiving” for those of us who love poetry. Shirl McPhillips shares her favorite resources for sharing that love with students.
Spoken Word Poetry
Gretchen Schroeder uses online videos as resources to teach her high school students to appreciate spoken-word poetry and write their own.
Forest Bathing
Shirl McPhillips explains how "forest bathing" is a wonderful entry point for writing, especially in early spring.
Inspiring Students to Revise
Melanie Meehan uses revision strips to move young writers beyond "I'm done!" and into expanding and editing their writing.
Choose Your Own Grammar Adventure
Gretchen Schroeder shares a quick exercise she’s developed for her high school students to hone grammar and editing skills using online video resources and individual Chromebooks.
How to Write a Sentence
Bitsy Parks realizes charts will help her first graders craft sentences. She shares how her sentence writing charts have changed over time.
Questioning Within Read Alouds
Melanie Meehan looks at the issue of engagement through the lens of student questions during read alouds, and shares a strategy to provoke more thoughtful student participation.
Leveraging Read Aloud
Christy Rush-Levine finds that administrators are questioning the value of read alouds, especially with older students. She shares how she uses the picture book Love in her middle school classroom to launch challenging discussions about timely themes.
End-of-Year Read Alouds
Bitsy Parks explains how the ending weeks of read alouds in her first-grade classroom are designed to celebrate learning and shared experiences from the entire year.
Building Stronger Wordsmiths
Maria Caplin is integrating vocabulary work into content areas.
Meaningful Data
Ruth Ayres explains how data can make students and teachers feel empowered or deflated—so much depends on what you are looking for and how you present it.
Asking Students to Grade Themselves
Asking students to assess and grade their own work cements learning and deepens understanding for many students, but only if it is done in a thoughtful, collaborative way. Melanie Meehan takes you step-by-step through the process in a fifth-grade classroom.
Leveraging Reading Assessment Benchmarks
Benchmark assessments can be incredibly time-consuming for teachers to complete. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills describe how they leverage the time spent by using the assessments in strategy conferences with students.
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