We’ve looked at what impact means, how to start with ourselves as we try to increase our impactfulness, how to leverage what we do in the classroom toward impact, and how to work better with colleagues toward impact. Graphically, that’s this: Today, we’ll bring it home by talking about the other groups of adults we […]
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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 […]
Literacy Educators: Let’s Get Serious about Noncognitive Skills
The Common Core does a pretty good job of laying out some key cognitive skills students need to have to be ready for the literacy demands of a career or college. Granted, we need to reduce the standards into a simpler, more power-packed set of focused literacy priorities (the non-freaked out approach being one possible example) if we’re going to truly see literacy […]
“Help! I Need Appropriately Complex Texts for my Elementary and Middle School Students!”
If you are an elementary or middle school teacher who has ever perused my article of the week lists (disclaimer: Kelly Gallagher is the man who invented Articles of the Week), you’ve probably wanted to hurt me. This is because my articles are often a stretch even for my ninth graders (after all, the vocabulary difficulty of newspapers has remained stable […]
Using the Efficient “Take a Stand” Strategy to Hook Kids into a Reading
Let me just start out with this: Erica Beaton (of b10lovesbooks.wordpress.com/#seekthebalance/my next door teacher neighbor fame) introduced me to this strategy (her version is much more sophisticated — see her explanation in the comments), and I’ve also seen something like it accredited to George Hillocks in Michael Smith’s, Deborah Appleman’s, and Jeffrey Wilhelm’s book UnCommon Core (which […]