'literacy' Category
When Worlds Don’t Collide
Once upon a time I looked forward to seeing mainline literacy journals take an interest in blogging. So, it was good to see an article in this month’s Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy on using of blogs for literature study, Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class [...]
Opportunistic Teaching
UPDATE: WRITING WORKSHOP -
There’s a lot going on at once. Thankfully, there are two teachers in the room - one of the best things to come from Title I grant money is that I now enjoy regular backup from a retired English teacher, working as an aide. We conference at random with whoever seems to [...]Critical Moves
Because I teach writing, and because my students publish some of their writing to the Internet, I’ve been thinking about the differences between blogging effectively, and simply writing online. This is a question that Bud Hunt explored recently, and he sees hypertext links as the essential difference. But I’m sure that Bud would agree there’s [...]
The Science of Reading is “like deja vu all over again”
Yogi Berra was right, It’s like deja vu all over again. Marc Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz links to a dogfight between the Fordham Institute, Robert Slavin, and the federal government over a funding cut to the Reading First program, a major mess. See Gary Stager’s summary of the report by the Inspector Generals’ [...]
Teaching Reading in the Contact Zone
I’m not sure whether this qualifies for Miguel’s passion quilt meme, but my son and daughter have turned our yard into a terrain park. I’m not sure about the meme business because this isn’t something that I am passionate for kids to learn about. It’s their passion. I’m just the observer/promoter. The project began [...]
Oil and Anger
Sometimes an intersection of possibilities comes along for teaching a lesson, and this one has dredged up a lot of painful memories for me.
There was a hearing today in the US Supreme Court about whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill in 1989, nearly 20 years ago. I also [...]
The Right Way to Teach
This little bit of personal history is inspired by Alice Mercer’s post about scripted reading instruction, which sounds to me like a relatively simple way for school districts to train teaching personnel instead of promoting real professional learning opportunities. I like Alice’s recommendation: “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, [...]
On Reading Skills and Strategies
Skills is a word that gets a regular workout in discussions about education. I used it in my previous post about reading instruction, making a distinction between skills and strategies. I listed what I saw as examples of each in order to amplify this statement: “Good assessment techniques provide information about the skills and strategies [...]
Reading Teacher Mojo
Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.”
Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk [...]A Time to Write
Yesterday was a professional development day. Kids were home. Teachers met in the school library and talked about the Six Traits writing framework.
Six Traits is an analytical framework for evaluating student writing. It is also useful as an instructional tool which can give us a common language we can use to talk about [...]
