Yesterday, I opened a conversation about the roles that assessment and intervention play in attending to the needs of struggling and reluctant readers. Would you like to know the most important thing I’ve learned over the years? That it’s important for me to put what I believe and what I’m passionate about aside in service to others. When it comes to assessing the needs of readers, the data we’re looking at don’t provide answers either.…
Last week, Kim Yaris and Jan Burkins invited me to begin this conversation about text complexity and cognitive dissonance on their blog. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share more about this here and return to this space to link up the posts below as I go. Much of what I’ve been learning has emerged from my work with reluctant and struggling readers in classrooms. Curious to know what others are discovering as well.…
Happy Friday! Last week, I was beyond excited when Jan Burkis and Kim Yaris invited to guest post over at their place. I took the opportunity to start a conversation there about creating and managing cognitive dissonance. It’s one I plan to continue here next week, as my experiences implementing the Common Core Learning Standards and the six shifts that underpin them have surfaced some new and unexpected realizations about this particular topic. I’m…
When I began Common Core lesson studies with elementary teachers two years ago, they made the same surprising observation in each of the classrooms I taught in that spring: the background knowledge that many readers shared was often very interesting. Some was even compelling. And much of it was completely inaccurate. This didn’t surprise us, but what typically happened next did: when I invited readers to share their background knowledge through talk prior to reading,…
When last we spoke, I found myself positioned on a precipice, anxiously confronting the torrent that was Race to the Top. And as mandate after mandate continued to crash and swirl around me, threatening to pull everything and everyone I care about in this field into a hot mess of high emotion and utter chaos, I made an important and very deliberate decision: I put my head down and quietly got to work with all…
I’m gearing up for a winter and spring filled with different instructional coaching experiences. I’m looking forward to this more than any other work I’ve been involved with so far this year because kids will finally be involved. In most of the schools that I am working in, we have spent more than a year wrapping our heads around Race to the Top, exploring the Common Core Learning Standards, and defining what the six shifts…
David Coleman’s mock lesson relevant to King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail offers initial perspective about what instruction with the Common Core might look like. It also raises some important questions, which many of the teachers that I am working with raised throughout our unit design sessions this fall. The teachers that I am working with are eager to know what the six instructional shifts will look like in their classrooms with their students. Some are…
Recently, I created a landing page for all of the posts that I’ve been sharing relevant to my work with the Common Core. I plan to update it at the end of each week, as my work inside of local school districts continues and my reflections on that work unfold. You can find the archives here, linked within a larger narrative that summarizes my process so far. This week, I’ll be sharing a bit about…
As we’re preparing to engage classrooms full of kids in the shared reading of sufficiently complex text, the teachers that I am working with have made some predictions about the challenges they might face. They want to handle them as pro-actively as possible, so their instructional planning is attending to these hunches. For instance: We predict that all readers may experience increased levels of frustration as they begin confronting curricula and immersing themselves in resources that…
In addition to learning what we can about the art of close reading, teachers that I am working with are also finding their study of the following very helpful as they plan to implement the third instructional shift underpinning the Common Core: Jim Burke’s text, The English Teacher’s Companion (which my former grad students will remember fondly), his work relevant to teaching with questions, and his use of sentence frames (which he touches on in…