When we assume a person understands us, has learned something, or has otherwise changed just because we told them something, taught them something, covered something in a meeting — that’s First Degree Assumicide. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students all fall prey to this dangerous assumption. Example 1: “Class, stop with the lower-cased first person pronoun! We’ve […]
Setting a Summer Reading Project
In my last post, I suggested that there’s a time to take on no new reading at all, instead setting one’s course for the full exploration of a single book. I did this five years ago or so with Mike Schmoker’s Focus, and much of the subsequent blogging and teaching I’ve done (including the development of […]
No More (New) Reading
“I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once.” — C. S. Lewis It’s getting on summer time, and if you’re at all like me, then you’ve got an unreasonably high stack of books that you want to tear into between now and when school starts back up. Before you get […]
Knowledge Builds on Knowledge
At the time of this writing, I have a clear idea of how you and I can improve our practice in five of the six components of the “Non-Freaked Out” Foundations Framework for Literacy Instruction Across the Content Areas. For argument, reading, writing, and speaking/listening, a general pattern emerges: quantity precedes quality. From this, we […]
The Goal of Reading (and Basic Strategies for Achieving It)
A pivotal point in a reader’s journey is when she realizes, either intuitively or explicitly, that the goal of reading is to obtain meaning. If we’re not gaining meaning in a novel or a textbook or an article, then we’re not really reading. You’ve not read something until you’ve understood it. When our students reach […]