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This is a follow up to an article I wrote for Choice Literacy. I highly recommend signing up for a subscription to access all the smart thinking and writing from literacy teachers and leaders. I also appreciated Ruth Ayres’s thoughtful lead essay that builds off of the piece. Earlier this year, my parents dropped…
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On Friday, I started putting together my weekly round up of article summaries and analysis. This project began in November of last year, as a way to separate my more erudite posts from my regular ramblings on my blog, Reading by Example. This site would also give me a more appropriate platform to promote my formal…
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Yesterday, I signed a contract with ASCD to write a book for the Arias series. The topic will be about debunking some of the technology myths that seem to linger in education. It is a short-form publication, around 10,000 words, so we are looking at a publication date of August 2015. Since that’s only four months away, I…
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The most powerful way of thinking about a teacher’s role is for teachers to see themselves as evaluators of their effects on students. – John Hattie Battle of Semantics by Melissa Emler (Connecting to Create Greatness, January 2, 2015) A former high school English teacher and current education consultant confronts the concept of separating teaching from…
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I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really…
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Leadership is 90 percent pulling weeds and 10 percent planting seeds.- Austan Goolsbee Common Core Reading: Difficult, Dahl, Repeat by Cory Turner (nprED, November 15, 2014) National Public Radio profiled a fifth grade classroom and their use of Common Core-aligned texts and practices. Turner described one lesson on close reading, with the teacher getting…