Choice Lit Topic: Community Building
It’s one of the big paradoxes of literacy instruction – students best learn how to read and write independently when they have a strong community of support in classrooms. How teachers build those thoughtful, kind, and challenging classroom communities is explained in these resources.
Results
Responding to Dysregulated Behaviors: A Symptom of What?
This is the second installment of a four-part series chronicling the responses when a student with dysregulated behaviors joins Becca Burk's kindergarten class mid-year. A decade ago, I was in...
A Poetic Beginning
It is no easy task for students to jump back into writing at the start of the school year after taking a summer hiatus. I used to ask students to...
Let’s Begin
It’s the first day of the Choice Literacy writing retreat. I’ve driven a little over three hours with a friend and fellow writer to arrive at a New England inn...
Do I Belong?
At the end of the school year, a child handed me this poem, and I was struck by the line You make me feel like I belong here. As I...
Revisiting: Getting to Know My Students
I was recently talking to a colleague and shared, “I don’t know my students as well as I did in the past.” I could sense a little surprise in her...
Fostering Reading Lives in the Library
At the end of the school year I like to recognize the students who check out the most books in each grade. One student—we’ll call him Charlie—was a third grader,...
Advice from Hanks
I listened to Tom Hanks give a keynote session at the NCTE 2023 convention. I sensed that this was a big deal, but how could a movie star from movies...
The Power of Story
“Miss Masse,” Philippe said, looking at me with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I waked up on the bus and it was cold and nobody was there, and the door,...
Morning Message 2: Routine and Community
Stop by my room any morning and you’ll see the same thing. Students trickle in from the bus and the car line, some stopping at the cafeteria for breakfast, others...
The Language We Use and How It Strengthens Understanding
What works for small things, works for big ones. —Lauren Wolk, Echo Mountain, p. 184 I am married to a high school physics teacher, and during the virtual-teaching days of...
QuickTake: Grading Student Writing
Ruth Ayres shares a process for grading student writing that improves efficiency and accuracy.
Do the Hard Thing
As I prepared to give my graduate students the closing remarks for our first semester together, I found myself in a moment of reflection. When I was sitting in their...
Rural Communities
After three years teaching in a private school in Louisville, I moved back to the small county in rural Kentucky where I grew up, and accepted a job teaching freshman...
Read Aloud Magic
This is my most cherished time of the day. Gathered with students on the floor, I am sitting just above them on a stool so I can feel closer to...
Our Brains on Happiness
We’ve found something we now call the happiness advantage, which is when the brain is positive, it has an unfair advantage over the brain that is negative, neutral, or stressed....
Student Voices First
We have all been learning a lot about identities, meaningful representation, and creating classrooms of inclusion. I love this work, and it has opened up a world of ideas and...
Our Words Matter: Developing Perseverance in Literacy
Our words have weight from the first moment. “I don’t know how to draw me,” Mason says after I introduce our self-portrait project on the first day of kindergarten. Given...
Informal Conversations Give Insight for Instruction
Melissa Quimby encourages informal conversations with students to get insight into their personalities and lives.
Building a Classroom Library with Students (and Navigating the Tricky Parts)
I intentionally started the school year with hundreds of books scattered on a few shelves because I wanted the children to construct the library. And yes, after 10 days in...
Nourish a Sense of Belonging
Dana Murphy shares ways to nourish a sense of belonging in all students.
Lifting the Quality of Hands-Down Conversations
Before we begin our seventh whole-class hands-down conversation, I ask the class, “What do you notice about our hands-down conversations? What is working well, and what could we do even...
