Welcome to the penultimate portion of this post series (here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). If you like this post, you might like Never Finished: Continually Becoming the Teachers We Want to Be (and Staying Sane in the Process). Today, we’re going to examine a part of the most underrated element of the three-fold strategy […]
Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students
If you look at my original close reading post, you’ll see I was basically using the phrase “close reading” to refer to annotation. It took me a year or more to realize that I was saying one buzzwordy thing to mean a lot of explicit, less confusing things that readers do when grappling with a […]
Scaffolds for Dominating the Article of the Week
In my last post, I laid out the long, steamy romance that is my history with Kelly Gallagher’s article of the week assignment (disclaimer if you haven’t read it: it’s pretty much not romantic at all, or steamy — it’s just long). In this post, I want to share some resources that come out of last […]
There and Back Again: My Journey with Gallagher’s Article of the Week Assignment
Before the Common Core were a twinkle in David Coleman’s eye, Kelly introduced an assignment into his classroom called article of the week. In the assignment, students read complex informational texts and responded to them in writing. That writing was nearly always a blend of the explanatory and argumentative modes, and it often culminated with a discussion of the issues […]
A Non-Freaked Out Framework for Literacy Instruction Across the Content Areas, Common Core or Otherwise
This past summer, I began playing around with a 2.0 version of the “non-freaked out approach” to Common Core literacy, hoping to hone the thinking I put forward a year and a half or so ago into something more useable, more balanced, and more timeless (you’ll notice “close reading” died of buzzwordification). Here’s what I’m going to spend […]