Integrating making and writing experiences may not seem very difficult, but in my experience, making this marriage worthwhile requires some careful planning. It takes nothing to dump a pile of loose parts on a table and challenge kids to build, but I wonder: How many of them would build straight through an entire class without pausing to compose a single line, though? Those who are responsible for teaching writing are wise to consider this reality. Many…
Let’s call her Nadia. I’ve been working with her one on one for a little over a year now. “I suck at reading,” she told me bluntly, when she approached me for help toward the end of her sophomore year. “I do too sometimes,” I admitted, inviting her to sit with me a while so that I could learn more. We’ve learned a lot together, Nadia and I. It all started with frank conversations like…
“The sticky note is one of the most useful tools for knowledge work because it allows you to break any complex topic into small, moveable artifacts—knowledge atoms or nodes—that you can distribute into physical space by attaching them to your desk, walls, doors, and so on without wreaking total havoc. This allows learners to quickly and easily explore all kinds of relationships between and among the atoms and to keep these various alternatives within your…
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll admit: I agree with those who suggest that close reading isn’t a strategy, and I’m grateful to them for sustaining this particular conversation, even as some are beginning to grow weary with it. It’s an important one. If we fail to understand and honor the intention behind the call for close reading, we’ll likely fail to accomplish what is most critical: distinguishing readers who are strategic…
In my last post, I mentioned how some of the best conversations that I’ve had about close reading were steeped in stories that teachers shared about their own encounters with it. I recalled one of the first times I read a text closely, remembering how the experience drew me closer to my classmates and my teacher and not merely the text. Here’s the thing: when it’s working, close reading helps us savor delectable texts, and…
Image by Gris M. via flickr Four years ago, as teachers began digging into the Common Core Learning Standards and making sense of the six shifts that underpin them, questions about close reading began bubbling to the surface of nearly every discussion I was included in: What was it? How would we teach it? How would it be assessed? How would we know if we were doing it correctly? What would happen if we didn’t?…
This photo captures the thinking behind the most inspired moment of my week. I spent yesterday Gamestorming with a group of local English teachers in order to surface, prioritize, and resolve their emerging curricular needs. Once our work together was complete, we situated the games inside of a completely different context: lesson design. The anchor chart above reflects how we practiced using Post Ups, Clusters, Affinity Mapping, and Forced Ranking to help readers make…
Last month, a number of teachers and consultant friends of mine began kicking around the idea of creating an archive of paired passages and texts that educators could pull on for a variety of purposes. I liked this idea very much, but not for the reasons people might suspect. To be honest, I’m not sure how many people will find resources like this valuable in the long run. It’s not about the resource for me, though. It’s about…
Catherine Leach is a former Western New Yorker and a long-time friend of the WNY Young Writers’ Studio. She teaches and coaches at Sam Rayburn High School in Pasadena, Texas. I’m delighted to share this space with her today. It began with a lament. A few teachers were sitting around the lunch table, telling stories about catching plagiarists. I shared one of my best strategies: if the paper had a properly used semi-colon, it was…
During lesson study debriefs over the last several years, the teachers that I support shared their observations relevant to a variety of focal points. Often, they lingered over what they noticed about active participation, questioning, and the facilitation of large group discussion. As a pre-service teacher, I was fortunate enough to learn a great deal about active participation from my cooperating teacher, Janell Lindstrom. She coached me to question in ways that engaged learners and…