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Sketchnoting as a Response to Reading
When I first began to see sketchnotes on my Twitter feed, I was intrigued. Sketchnotes are a method of note taking that combines images and words. Some educators sketchnote at...
Coaching Purposeful Classroom Design
Candace scrolled excitedly down the page of the website filled with colorful stools, crisp conference tables with charging stations, and nifty caddies. “Ugh—I could spend my entire paycheck here!” she...
Bringing Order to the Bookroom
I was a big fan of Hope School’s bookroom. The bookroom is the result of more than a decade of work. It has a wide selection of leveled, read-aloud, and...
The Benefits of #bookaday
A few things came together to create one of my most favorite classroom routines. Jillian Heise took Donalyn Miller’s #bookaday idea and shared a picture book a day with her...
#bookaday in Middle School
One of the best teaching decisions I have made was having a #bookaday picture book read-aloud goal with my seventh- and eighth-grade classes this past school year. You may be...
Student-Designed Development Cards
The other day, I was planning to teach elaboration to fifth-grade students through demonstration, and I wanted to give them each their own printed cards of the teaching point and...
Practical Ways to Connect Students and Goals
We often hear the administrators in our building talking about self-assessment. In fact, the observation model that our school uses places a high value on students self-assessing their work. One...
Jumpstarting Student Writers
When I was in high school, I dated a guy who owned an antiquated MG. Although the car was extremely cute, it was also extremely inconsistent, and it frequently required...
The Basics of Teaching Internet Search Skills to Children
One of the most amazing things about living in the digital age is the fact that information is everywhere. With a few clicks, keystrokes, or taps I can get most...
A Better Hiring Process
Hiring great faculty is one of the most important and rewarding jobs for a principal. We can shape the future of our school with a lot less effort than it...
Video Games and Literacy
Picture this: A student finishes early with a letter-writing activity, thanking a community member for a donation to their classroom. The teacher encourages her to select an independent task for...
The iPad Is 7
Consider this: the iPad is only seven years old. Hard to believe, right? That thing—and its brothers and sisters, phones and tablets of various brand names—all seem to have been...
School Leaders and Written Communication
For several years now, I have taught a graduate class for aspiring school leaders. My students are practicing teachers and counselors who have their eye on being principals someday. As...
Paraphrasing to Let Teachers Lead
There was a diamond in the rough in the teacher’s lesson. Overall, it was a good lesson. She had provided choice in how students could respond to the whole-class reading...
You Say Tornado . . .
Whatever the weather served, that was what they ate. But it never rained rain. It never snowed snow. And it never blew just wind. It rained things like soup and...
Tapping into What Students Know
A surefire way for me to get snapped at is to tell my daughter to put on her turn signal while she's driving just as she’s about to do it...
Consistent Feedback in Writing Workshop
As a middle school language arts teacher, I am responsible for seeing that my readers and writers grow and achieve at their highest ability levels possible. That seems simple enough...
The Power of a Plastic Frame
When we were clearing out my grandmother’s house, she had hundreds of plastic frames—the ones you buy in a drugstore for about a dollar each. As I sorted through the...
Literacy and Last Days: Keeping It Simple
“I’m not doing a bouncy house.” That was my initial response when I heard that as principal of our school, I am tasked with coming up with the last-day activity...
Expert Students
“You have this way of buzzing around the room and sprinkling what each student needs right over them,” my administrator once told me in an evaluation conference. It was supposed...
Creating an On-Demand Writing Checklist
At the start and end of each writing unit, we use on-demand writing to assess what our students already know about a particular genre. This practice is one that we’ve...
