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Rethinking Reading Goals
This fall, my students' reading goals typically included sentences such as these: I want to read more minutes. I want to read more pages. I want to read a different...
How to Speak “Friend”
In my morning pre-kindergarten class, we speak many languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and English. As we are considered an English language classroom, our focus is on building understanding and...
Book Blurbs in the Middle School Classroom
We’ve all seen them when we are browsing for a book. They are those little words on the cover of a book with praise from another author. They are thoughts,...
Coaching Notetaking Skills
A few weeks ago, I was in a fourth-grade classroom as the teacher taught a lesson on notetaking. Listening to her, watching the students approximate what she was doing, and...
Poetry for Notetaking
On most days when I enter Katie Czerwinski’s sixth-grade classroom, I take out my trusty notebook and pen and pull up a chair beside a student or settle into a...
Researching Like Writers: From Read-Aloud to Notebooks
It is no secret that in my classroom we try to keep it real. Once the authenticity is gone from the work my students and I do together, my students...
Intervening with Read Aloud
Recent research indicates that increasing student engagement by 1 percent is correlated with a 6 percent increase in student performance on literacy assessments. We are not at all surprised, as...
Whole-Class Conversations for Read Aloud Closure
About 10 years ago, I began the ritual of having a whole-class conversation each time we finish a chapter book read aloud. I created this idea when I noticed that...
Hiring for Literacy: The Big Picture
Spring is an exciting time. The playgrounds are once again full of gleeful shouts from children, the promise of summer is in the air, and we, as educators, are seeing...
Hiring for Literacy: The Interview
When given the opportunity to interview candidates for a teacher or literacy support opening, it is easy for an interviewer or interview team to fall back on standard teacher interview...
Releasing Responsibility
"I see children as kites ..." writes Erma Bombeck. "You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you're both breathless ... they...
Surviving “That Class”
Amy had one of those classes. She had taught third grade for nine years and had never encountered a group of children who appeared to be so mean and uncaring....
Anchor Chart Changes
The other day I noticed the young teacher who was on indoor recess duty standing in the middle of my classroom, turning in a slow circle as she studied my...
Weekly Check-In Sheets
I think one of the most often asked questions when you share that you teach reading and writing workshop is “What do you do for grades?” This is a tough...
Learning How to Communicate: From Teacher to Coach
One fall Saturday evening, at the end of a long week when things felt a little out of control, I decided it would feel good to clean up and clear...
One Tool, Many Uses: Poetry Notebooks
Lori uses poetry notebooks in her first-grade classroom. I’ve been in her classroom many times when her students were using their poetry notebooks. The word notebook is probably a misnomer...
Blackout Poems and Paint-Chip Haiku: Two Fun Ways into Poetry with Adolescents
Writing can be really hard, especially for kids. I see my students struggle the most when I introduce poetry. It almost seems as if when they are given fewer words...
Giving Students a Notebook Tour
I don't remember ever having a writer's notebook in elementary school. Sometimes, I look at our students and my daughters with their writer’s notebooks and I wish I had a...
Using a Sketchbook as a Tool to Teach Grammar
A couple of years ago, I ran out to purchase a sketchbook after I heard how Kate Roberts and other staff developers from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project...
Wild Reading: A Coach’s Perspective
I just finished reading Donalyn Miller's book Reading in the Wild. I know her path to creating wild readers is an important one. She believes that reading should be a regular part...
The Secret to Productivity: Hard Work or Play?
In our culture, we learn that when something needs doing—writing a report, reading the manual on how to administer a new assessment, creating a bulletin board, organizing the classroom library—it...
