Yesterday was a coaching day, and I had an awful lot of fun hanging out with sixth grade students for the better part of the morning. I began the day in Danielle Cobb’s classroom, who has begun differentiating reading instruction and making use of formative assessment. Danielle knows that her kids struggle to identify main idea as they read, and yesterday’s demo lesson aimed to address that. I’m sharing that lesson here for two reasons:…
This post is for the teachers who hang out with me at the WNY Young Writers’ Studio, because Betsy asked: Ideas are but one of the Six Traits of Writing, and this is where we’re beginning tomorrow in Mrs. Urbanski’s sixth grade class. When the kids come in, I’m going to ask them to take their shoes off. Chaos might ensue soon afterward, and even if it does, I’ll try to remind them that attending…
Thoughts?
“Well, I hope now that he’s been elected, he can live up to that great promise of change that he’s been prattling on about for two years.” Barack Obama hadn’t even made his acceptance speech last night when comments like this started winding their way through the web, and I wasn’t surprised. Realizing change is a complicated thing and so many of us are desperate to see things happen quickly. But it’s never about what…
Allowing assessment to become an informative piece of the instructional process can start with very small steps, and in my experience, starting small prevents overwhelm and allows the true meaning of the formative assessment process to be preserved a bit better over time. Many of the teachers that I work with rely upon the 6+1 Traits of Writing in their efforts to help students better understand what good writing looks like and how they might…
People debate the pros and cons of immunization quite a bit in my personal parenting circle. My kids are immunized of course, as they have to be, but I’m fairly certain that every parent considers the safety of wide-range immunization practices. We have to, after all. We’re responsible for our childrens’ well being. Most of us learn what we need to and allow that knowledge to inform our widely varied choices. We all know that immunization…