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Can I Quote You on That?: Capturing Classroom Conversation
Sometimes inspiration for my teaching life comes from seemingly disparate experiences in my personal life. I spent a recent Saturday afternoon surrounded by a gaggle of giddy women who had...
Unpacking the Common Core Standards: Compare and Contrast Nonfiction
Informational texts will become more and more important as states move toward implementing the Common Core. Looking carefully at the nonfiction standards is essential for teaching well. As teachers, we...
Argumentative, Opinion, and Persuasive Writing in the Common Core
Change can be challenging, even scary. My daughter had a tough time getting back into the swing of things after winter break. We would be getting ready for the day...
How Do We Structure Small Groups? (Part 3 of the Grouping Series)
Fifth-grade teacher Pam was encouraged by her principal to transition from mostly whole-group instruction to include more small-group instruction, especially in the area of reading. The previous year she'd used...
Mentor Texts for a Writing Study in Graphica
Graphic novels have become part of our students' reading lives. It only makes sense that because of this, they'd want to write graphic novels. I am all for students trying...
Common Core Conversations: Reading in the Disciplines
The Common Core Standards demand that the building of knowledge through reading text plays a fundamental role in those disciplines. In history and social studies, the analysis of primary and...
Katherine Casey on Sharing Blunders with Colleagues (PODCAST)
In this podcast, Katherine Casey explains to Heather Rader why it is helpful for coaches to share their teaching blunders with colleagues. Katherine is the author of Literacy Coaching: The...
Invocation at the End of Summer
I call on the spirit of summer's end, of tangled roots and the earth's deep mold, a swollen sponge of mushroom and moss. Give me your hum. I call on...
Skype an Author with Kate Messner (PODCAST)
Kate Messner is one of those amazing women who are capable of handling a few full-time jobs at the same time. She is a middle-school teacher, the author of fine...
Pitching My Lesson Plans for a Day of Peace and Poetry
One beautiful day in October, I arrived at school to see the most amazing work taking place in the side yard. Our art teacher and several parent volunteers were placing...
The Superpower of Reflecting
What is your superpower? Are you a great listener, storyteller, misconception spotter, advocate, or feedback giver? Educators have a multitude of superpowers, and we'll focus here on one that takes...
Improving Poetry’s Rap
The groans of the naysayers drown out the timid cheers of the few poetry lovers in my class. I have just announced that it's time for "Poetry Friday." My students...
Current and Cocoa: Mixing Social Studies and Literacy
While student teaching, I was invited to a teacher's classroom on a Thursday for "Current and Cocoa." Next to a hot pot was a big bucket of dry cocoa mix,...
Conferring with Parents (ROUND-UP)
Parent conferences are a time of preparing, collecting, analyzing, scheduling, and sharing. This fall we asked Choice Literacy contributors to share some of their best tips and reminders for conferring...
Trying to Coach Without the Budget in Mind
With daily headlines keeping alive the reality of a sputtering economy, I fear for my job more than ever. Perhaps it was my sheer naïveté in my first year coaching,...
Wild Facts
I love discovering high quality digital reading resources for my third and fourth graders to use in our classroom and for home reading. I love it even more when it...
Sorting Students for Flexible Groups Across Classrooms
Recently the teachers in my building learned that after receiving district funds for the past five years to support our intervention efforts for struggling students, the funds would be eliminated....
Learning from Master Teachers: Final Lessons in the Cycle (Part II)
This is the second installment in my two-part lesson series on teaching students how to record and share their thinking in whole-class, small-group, and one-on-one conversations. This is a cycle...
Image of the Week: Building a Classroom Community Through Visual Literacy
A nonfiction routine and ritual that my students love is called "Image of the Week." Each Wednesday, an image of interest is posted in the center of a whiteboard in...
Mentor Texts for Organizing Writing
One of the things I like about the Sunday paper is the coupon section. When I'm finished cutting up the paper, there are coupons strewn all over my kitchen table....
The Art of Slow Reading: A Conversation with Tom Newkirk (PODCAST)
Tom Newkirk chats with Brenda Power about his book The Art of Slow Reading. Newkirk is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and the author of many acclaimed...
