Tara Barnett and Kate Mills
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Tara Barnett and Kate Mills are longtime contributors to Choice Literacy. They met while co-teaching a fourth-grade class, and experienced the powerful effects of professional collaboration on both themselves and the students in the classroom. Tara is now a middle school literacy teacher, and Kate is a K-5 literacy coach. Though they’re no longer in the classroom together, they still depend on each other for professional reflection and growth, and meet up for weekly runs. You can find them on Twitter, @taraandkate.
Most Recent Content
Protecting Choice and Inquiry with Outdoor Learning Walks
As curriculum shifts in our buildings to feeling more structured, Kate Mills and Tara Barnett reflect on how to protect student choice and opportunities for inquiry. They share a simple and practical way to create opportunity for both choice and inquiry through outdoor learning.
Lessons from a Bird-Watcher: How to Make Space for Students’ Passions
Students are entering our classroom with passions. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills consider how to tap students’ excitement and create space for them to share their interests as part of the learning community.
Latest and Greatest Ways to Show Independent Reading Is Valued
Even as the pressure to add more whole-class reads and articles with focused reading lessons closes in around us with pressure from administrators and school boards, Tara Barnett and Kate Mills are committed to finding ways to get books into students’ hands and show how much they value reading. Here are some of their best tips for keeping the choice in reading—as well as the love of reading—alive.
Purposeful Ways to Incorporate Interactive Writing at the Start of the Year
One of the instructional methods we love the most in primary classrooms is interactive writing. It allows us to target the needs of our learners as individuals and reinforce the phonics rules we’ve been studying whole-class, builds community by co-creating something together, and gives us a chance to use our learning in real, authentic, and purposeful ways. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills offer simple ways you can use interactive writing to co-create your classroom space with your students.
Authentic Audiences for Writing in School
Our student writers deserve to have authentic audiences. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share two opportunities for authentic peer audiences for finished writing pieces in school. Finding space and time for student writing to be seen and heard by their peers in meaningful ways is essential.
Building Trust in Our Classrooms
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills remind us that more important than the physical layout of the classroom or the assessments we’ll give is the type of community we’ll become. Building a brave and enthusiastic community of learners is the foundation that everything else stands on. They share a community-building experience that can be adapted for any age.
Can AI Help with Assessment?
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills explore using AI to help with grading student writing. In this practical and insightful article, they share a process for using AI as a co-teacher and their reflection on whether it helped them save time (nope) and made their feedback more useful (yep). They share a downloadable student literary essay reflection sheet that you might want to use in your classroom, too.
Harnessing the Power of Words
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share three quick ways to increase vocabulary exposure in middle school. They also offer a summary of the importance of vocabulary development that inspires the urgency of vocabulary instruction.
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