There is no neat way of capturing the beautiful messiness and grappling that happens when we offer our students choice.
Reading Workshop: Losing the Fear of Sharing Control, an Epilogue
Originally published September 7, 2015. Lesley Roessing has been an invaluable resource for Ethical ELA, and her contributions on the Facebook page Teaching Teens and its book groups are just priceless. Thank you, Lesley. ____________________________________________________________ In Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop, Lesley …
Read Everything: Why What Teachers Read (and Don’t Read ) with Students Matters
Deliberate or not, reading teachers privilege certain voices and experiences over others when they choose this author or that, this poem or that, this book or that. Some teachers may not want to take on political or social justice issues, but they are doing just that.
Top Ten Books to Start a Classroom Library (Plus Ten More)
As junior high English teachers, we see how the push to standardize curriculum and prepare for tests has us spending more time in meetings and reviewing data than reading the latest young adult novels. We ask students to be “readers,” but are we even keeping up with the latest titles or up-and-coming authors? This school year, we wanted to do something for our students and ourselves to make reading class, well, about the power and joy of reading again. We wanted students to find their way back to books this year. We wanted to find our way back to books this year — to be readers again.
Assessment in the Reading Workshop without Grades: What did you read? What did you do with your reading? What did you learn?
Your assignment is a 2nd Quarter Summary blog post to me and your parents about what you’ve learned and how, using the standards and evidence from class. That is the first line of the “final exam” I wrote for our second quarter, seventh grade reading class. …
No Grading: I Think I Did it Wrong
After spending the summer researching assessment and grading, after meeting with colleagues and my principal about facilitating a no-grades classroom this school year, after resisting numbers and letter grades on student work for nearly nine weeks, after countless hours of writing narrative feedback to students …
Classroom Library: Tips from a Librarian
Setting up a middle school classroom library with the help of Erin Linsenmeyer of the Downers Grove Public Library.