Articles

Connecting with Students at Home

Julie Johnson learns some important lessons about connecting with students remotely, and few of them are about technology.

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.

The 4 Fs of Assessment

Justin Stygles describes the four crucial components of effective assessment.

Discussion and Summary As a Prelude to Fiction Writing

Haiku Writing

Mandy Robek shares the power of publishing poetry with her young writers.

Helping Kids Lead Every Day: Changing Who “Owns” Small Groups in the Classroom

Tammy Mulligan knows the most productive and engaging discussions to build reading comprehension are not monopolized by the teacher. She creates a structure to support students to engage in deeper work with each other in small groups. This is the first part of a three-part series.

Student-Led Conferences from Many Perspectives

Jennifer Schwanke and Franki Sibberson share four perspectives on student-led conferences — teacher, principal, student, and parent.

Overcoming: Helping Students Process Covid Feelings

Julie Cox reminds us that for many students, the loneliness and fear of COVID years clings like smoke, and they don’t always have the language to talk about it. While we have worked hard at helping students reclaim content knowledge, we must also help them express and process feelings they might not know how to recognize.

Using Whiteboards Before Writer’s Notebooks

Jen Court shares the way whiteboards and conversation lifted pressure from student writers so they could create poetry.

Giving Writers What They Need

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills are inspired by their own writing retreat experience to give students exactly what they need to thrive as writers. Take their advice to help writers thrive in your classroom, too.

Avoiding Implementation Through Lamination

Jennifer Schwanke questions the routines of how wall displays are used in classrooms.

Maximizing Instructional Time at the Start of a New Unit

Time is precious in classrooms, so Melanie Meehan shares strategies to ensure it isn't wasted at the start of new writing units by teaching skills students may already possess.

Instructional Routines That Promote Agency for Multilingual Learners

Cultivating agency is a matter of building small, intentional moves that ask students to be part of the learning process. Stella Villalba offers three ways educators can support the growth of multilingual learners in all learning spaces. 

Shake It Up: Active Learning Strategies That Engage Students

When Gretchen Schroeder found herself wanting to make her lessons fun and enjoyable, she realized she was focused on trying to entertain and dazzle rather than facilitate learning. She offers three ways to help students be active learners through conversations, reflection, and collaboration.

Choice in Assessment

Christy Rush-Levine explores the way a shift in assessment questions can give students ownership of their thinking and responsibility for developing meaning from a text.

Field Experience: Kindergarten Writers

Spend time with the youngest writers and you will be mesmerized by their writing processes. Ruth Ayres assembled a field experience focused on kindergarten writers.

Classroom Tours: Learning from Colleagues

Barbara Coleman finds classroom tours are a terrific professional development activity early in the year, fostering unexpected collaboration among colleagues.

Writing Workshop Teacherisms

Jennifer Jones reflects upon the “teacherisms” in writing workshops — the language we use that defines our values and routines.

Teaching Passion and Tech Tools: A Conversation with Angela Maiers (PODCAST)

Using Skype in the Classroom

Katherine Sokolowski has suggestions for Skype use in classrooms, covering everything from student etiquette to special events.

A Just-Right Lesson for Just-Right Books

Melissa Styger finds she needs to make changes to her just-right book lesson to meet the needs of her third-grade students.

Prompting and Support: Understanding the Language of the Common Core in Kindergarten

The words prompting and support appear often in the kindergarten Common Core State Standards. Mandy Robek analyzes what prompting and support looks and sounds like in her kindergarten classroom by using a video example.

Organizing Materials to Support Literacy Learning (Classroom Design Series Part 3)

Ann Marie Corgill shares how she organizes materials for literacy learning in the third installment of her design series.

In Praise of Handwritten Notes

Handwritten notes have timeless appeal, and great value for teachers and literacy leaders.

Notetaking Series Part II: Honing Your Notetaking Skills, One Strategy at a Time

One skill at a time — here are some suggestions for a step-by-step approach to learning how to take good observational notes in the classroom.

First Day of School Read-Alouds with Global and Multicultural Perspectives

Welcome your students to school by honoring their cultures — this diverse list is just right for diverse classrooms.

A Hand to Hold: Crying and Community in Preschool

Sometimes it takes a village to help a preschooler feel a part of the group, especially one who cries almost all the time. Kelly Petrin finds her young students have more empathy and resiliency than she imagined when she enlists their support.

Intentional Consolidation and Closure

Mallory Messenger emphasizes the importance of providing time for students to share their learning and offers different formats for a share session. Mallory guides us in making decisions so that share time consolidates and uplifts the learning.