Today, I’m thrilled to welcome teacher-librarian Melanie Mulcaster to my little corner of the web. Melanie has made a home at Hillside Public School in Mississauga, Ontario. I had the great fortune to meet her in person last summer, and we became fast friends. I’m honored to feature her reflections about making, reading, writing, and documentation here today. Please follow her on Twitter and drop by her blog to get to know her better. Making…
“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?…
Daniel Willingham has been known to challenge a popular theory or two. I find his work provocative, and I have refined my own perspectives a bit upon consideration of some of his arguments. Take a peek. Discuss. I’m wondering what others think……
Teachers ask for alternatives to traditional book reporting because they know that if there is anything worse than writing and reading a four paragraph text summary to a classroom full of your peers, it would be assuming the position of audience member AND evaluator. I know that there are more than a few WNY teachers in Florida this week, lounging by pools with stacks of papers next to them, waiting to be graded. That’s one…
I spent today exploring the practice of literature circles with a group of English Language Arts teachers from across our region. It’s always interesting when public and nonpublic school teachers come together to collaborate around any one best practice, but the disparity between these two factions of our education system with regard to resources is fairly outrageous. A good amount of time was spent discussing the beauty of the classroom library and the grief that some teachers feel…