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…
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…
1. Frame it positively. I notice that all too often, readers assume that unless they are reading fast, reading accurately, and making perfect meaning from text, they are failing. Several weeks ago, as I was guiding high school readers through an incredibly complex passage, we began by unpacking this fallacy. “So, reading hard stuff is kind of like seeing a live performance of Shakespeare,” someone in the room suggested. “The language might kind of wash…
Students’ ability to read complex text does not always develop in a linear fashion. Although the progression of Reading standard 10 (see below) defines required grade-by-grade growth in students’ ability to read complex text, the development of this ability in individual students is unlikely to occur at an unbroken pace. Students need opportunities to stretch their reading abilities but also to experience the satisfaction and pleasure of easy, fluent reading within them, both of which…
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.…