Over the summer, my Advanced Placement World History students are assigned to learn a set of dates and what those dates mean. That assignment has evolved (and simplified) with each year I’ve given it, but it’s purpose is always the same: I want my students to have an initial, very rough draft of world history […]
Instruction
A Dangerous Assumption
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 […]
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 […]
Two Ways to Improve Listening (and One Way Not To)
SLANT: Sit up, Lean forward, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, and Track the speaker. I used to have a SLANT poster hanging up in my classroom, right next to the one for PVLEGS. I had learned of SLANT from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion; PVLEGS came from Erik Palmer’s Well Spoken. They seemed to make […]