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Learning Labs for Professional Development
With a staff of 42 teachers ranging from one year of experience to 30-plus years of experience, differentiation of professional learning is something our school leadership team is constantly struggling...
Coaching Letter to Jo
Jo is a fifth-grade teacher in Harlem. Although she has many responsibilities, Jo and I are working primarily on enhancing curriculum, instruction, and assessment related to her instructional reading block....
Coaching Letters
Does writing a letter lead a teacher to a deeper understanding of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, or does writing a letter lead an instructional leader to better serve those they...
Picture Books or Beginning Readers?
A few weeks ago, Kim and Lily were snuggled in a beanbag chair with their heads together. They were trying to decipher some troublesome words in a book. “Sat? Seat?”...
Questions and Picture Books
Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read. Marilyn Jager Adams...
Nine Picture Books for Teaching Mindfulness
In our last booklist for Choice Literacy, we shared titles with characters or events that demonstrated mindfulness. In this booklist, we offer picture books with more overt connections to mindfulness....
Accountable Talk: Beginning Steps
As another set of state test scores reaches our doorway, our grade 3-6 teachers are frustrated at the amount of work they have done with students over the past four...
How to Get a Book to Catch Fire
Each year there are certain books that fly off my shelves. Books that I have to create waiting lists for to accommodate eagerly awaiting readers. Books that students can’t stop...
New Words for the New Year
The clean slate of January 1 refreshes our visions of our higher selves. The potential of the New Year gives us energy and inspires newness: new diets, new interests, new...
Explore: Time for Nonfiction
My desire for intentional time set aside to read nonfiction led to the development of a routine in my class called Explore. I set aside time within our weekly schedule...
The Power of a Hashtag
A lot of teachers around the world have begun using Twitter and creating class Twitter accounts so the outside world can glance into their students’ learning experience. Many have even...
Twitter in the Classroom
When I tell people—parents, students, and colleagues—that I have a class Twitter account set up for my students to use, I always see puzzled expressions. How can 10-year-olds possibly be...
Choosing the Right Tool for Your Message
As I become more and more proficient in the kitchen, I find that I need different tools to help me get the best results. It didn’t take me long to...
Secrets of Coaching Revisited
Listen First Teach by Example Be Patient I first read these words of the late Juli Kendell back in 2007 in an article she wrote on the secrets of school-based...
Where Am I Going and How Did I Get Here?
And you may ask yourself What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself Where does that highway go? And you may ask yourself Am I right? . ....
Classroom Management and Student Responsibility
This year, my workshop time increased from 55 to 80 minutes, which still isn't long enough for all we want to accomplish. With the increase in time, however, came added...
Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Teaching Book Choice Strategies to Middle Schoolers
At the beginning of the year, the air in my classroom and the hallways of my school is thick with excitement and anticipation as we look forward to the preteens...
Resource Round-Up for Text Types
My colleague Samantha Munnecke and I had just finished facilitating our Introduction to Writing Workshop series when it was time to create a new course and respond to teachers’ content...
Coaching the Nuts and Bolts of Book Bags
We are seeing reading workshop thriving in classrooms where we coach teachers. It is so exciting to hear students talking about the books they like, the authors they have discovered,...
Organizing Craft Minilessons
Harvesting minilesson ideas from children's books is valuable for instruction during a writing conference or for whole-group minilessons. Over the years, I've developed a system for keeping track of writer's...
My Ideal Professional Bookshelf: What Does Yours Look Like?
Inspired by our discussions of an important book in our professional lives (see Part 1), our literacy teacher support group decided to take our work a step further and create...
