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Category Archives: literacy

reading/writing/making sense

Rethinking School Reading

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

With a little over 2 weeks of school left, we are finalizing things, making ready for the grand summer release. Today I asked my sixth graders to reflect on their growth as readers, and to write about what they’d learned (if anything) about themselves or books, based on what they read in school this year. [...]

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Unfinished Business – A Pedagogy for the Planet

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It’s still Earth Day here along the the northern rim of the planet, near the eastern edge of the international date line. Spring is here at last; it is brown and muddy and beautiful without any snow. This was my 30th winter in Alaska, and I still look forward to the regular changes, no matter [...]

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This is Not A Test

Saturday, February 13, 2010

After noting the disappearance of Marc Dean Millot’s post from Alexander Russo’s TWIE (Scholastic Inc) blog, I got an email from Millot asking if I’d be interested in providing him with some blog space to explain what happened. I said OK, and he says he’ll submit something here in the next few days. In the [...]

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Critical Readings

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Public School in Los Angeles is a school with no curriculum. Someone proposes a class, and when enough interest builds, a teacher is found to teach whoever signed up. The school isn’t accredited; there are no degree programs. It’s a project of Telic Arts Exchange, an organization that “emphasizes social exchange, interactivity and public [...]

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Reading Free

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Dina Strasser and I have begun a joint blogging venture, comparing notes on our reading classrooms this year. We set up a project blog called Reading Free, and plan to exchange posts there. I’m interested in this from a couple of different angles, one of them being the use of social media to support collaborative [...]

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Owning the Change Process

Monday, October 19, 2009

Today was a professional development day, and as these things go, it wasn’t bad. One thing that helped, I suspect, is that the school district curriculum department piggy-backed onto the Alaska State Literacy Association 2009 conference, so we were able to take advantage of some fresh ideas that weren’t part of the local institutional orthodoxy. [...]

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An Ecology of Adolescent Literacy

Thursday, October 1, 2009

This post is tangential to a series of posts that Tom Hoffman has done recently, in which he eviscerates the new Common Core(porate) English Language Arts Standards. I don’t see category links on his blog, so maybe the best place to look for them all at this point is in the monthly archive. He summarized [...]

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Getting Organized

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

We’re into the second week of school here this year. I’m still in the early getting-to-know-you period with my class, and we are all more or less on our best behavior, but judging from what I’ve seen so far this is going to be a good year. It’s my 27th in the classroom, and you’d [...]

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The Global Talent Pool

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Yet another dire warning about the need for workers who can “thrive in the global economy:” [T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit [...]

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Notes from the Margin

Sunday, June 7, 2009

It is no surprise that Gov. Palin wants to sit out the plan to write new national common core education standards. After all, she also wants to turn down $28.6 million in stimulus money for energy cost relief because taking it would require us to adopt energy-efficient building codes, which she says should be a [...]

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