I’m finishing up a professional development trip to California, and during these final days of the trip, a troubling (yet unsurprising) article has come to my attention: The article goes on to show that 47% of surveyed teachers would describe the Common Core professional development they’ve received as less than high quality. And all I can do […]
Back-to-School To-Do List #2: Establish Burning Questions
I can still remember sitting in the interview for the Lake Michigan Writing Project’s Invitational Summer Institute several years ago. I was surrounded by brilliance (I had known the people for a few minutes or so, but you could tell), and one of the LMWP leaders asked us this simple question: What are your burning questions […]
Back-to-School To-Do List #1: Get Ready for my First-Ever Student Teacher
I’m sitting in the Grand Rapids airport right now waiting for a flight to haul me out to California for the week. In Cali (oh, Cali — why can’t I be visiting you in February?) I’ll be leading four professional development days in a row at three separate schools, all around the non-freaked out approach […]
Three Great Points in Erik Palmer’s “Effective Communication” Video
I’ve written about Erik Palmer’s work before (remember PVLEGS?), and I’m working through his latest book Teaching the Core Skills of Listening and Speaking. But recently, I found something else of his that’s totally free and pretty powerful. It’s a video called “Effective Communication,” and while I’d encourage you to click here to watch it yourself, I […]
For Noncognitive Skill Development, Start with Growth Mindset — Here’s How
In my last post, I wrote that we literacy educators are wise to treat noncognitive skill development seriously and systematically; the research supporting them is too overwhelming to do less than choose the noncogs we want to aim for in our classrooms and then concertedly pursue their growth in ourselves and our students. In this post, I’d like to […]