Before we talk philosophy, before we discuss how to teach reading, writing or speaking, give me some numbers. How many texts are your students getting the opportunity to read in a year? How many articles, primary source documents, textbook pages, lab reports, novels, poems, and the like are a part of your curriculum every year […]
Non-Freaked Out Approach to Literacy Instruction
These 5 Things, All Year Long: An Overview of The Non-Freaked Out Framework for Literacy Instruction
[box type=”alert”]Note from Dave: This post eventually became These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most. Please note that all of the strategies, frameworks, and research referenced below are updated (and, in some cases, significantly changed, and, in all cases, significantly improved for that back. Mike Schmoker calls it “among the most […]
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 […]
New Thoughts on the Non-Freaked Out Approach to Common Core Literacy
About a year and a half ago, I came up with the non-freaked out approach to Common Core literacy while driving home from a conference for edu-policy types in my state capital of Lansing. I was frustrated by the acrimony that seemed to suffuse the day’s sessions — there were politicians bickering with superintendents bickering with teachers […]