Overview Docs help you communicate with every student in your room, but especially those who need support with copies of notes and those who are chronically absent! They also provide streamlined one-stop communication with administrators, parents, and colleagues. Here you can take a peek at a completed overview document from this school year! And […]
Classroom seating. It’s one of the very first things you consider as a new teacher. How do I want my room arranged? How do I decide which students should sit next to one another? You do some research and you ask other teachers what works for them, and eventually you reluctantly settle on an […]
As is our habit, we are taking the summer away from the blog to read, write, and recharge. We’ll be back in late August with new content, but for the summer, let’s take a journey down memory lane as we visit our ten most-read posts from the previous school year! This semester I’m bringing […]
As is our habit, we are taking the summer away from the blog to read, write, and recharge. We’ll be back in late August with new content, but for the summer, let’s take a journey down memory lane as we visit our ten most-read posts from the previous school year! Successful co-teaching, to me, […]
This semester I’ve been chronicling my first-ever experiment with Genius Hour and its intersection with the regular machinations of our writing workshop. You can catch up on the other posts in this series before diving into this wrap up! ________________________________________________________________________________________ Genius Hour, and the school year, are almost over. My students are writing their final […]
As much as I hate to admit it, I was not much of a reader in high school. It’s not that I didn’t like reading. I did. I just didn’t know what to read. My friend would buy books every now and then and pass them along to me. I would read them and enjoy […]
I’m spending the next few posts sharing how I’m using Genius Hour to help kids follow their passions to deeper research, learning, and, of course, writing! You can see past posts here: Introduction + Context Finding, Developing, and Pitching Ideas Beyond conferring with students, blogging is the only formal accountability system I am using in […]
For the next few weeks, I am going to share about how my experiment with Genius Hour intersects writing workshop — and how giving kids choice and freedom to access their passion helps you do it all! If you need to get caught up, I gave an introduction and overview in my first post in […]
Paige’s post today reminds us that our very best teaching with one group of students isn’t our best teaching with a different group — we must constantly bend our teaching to meet the needs of the students in front of us. Many of us cringe at the leveling of students and especially at the titles […]
Reading and Writing Workshop are my teaching superpowers and my kryptonite. While the workshop model enables me to be the teacher I want to be to empower my students to be the kind of students they are truly capable of being, they can occasionally make me hesitant to try new models. I love consistency (so do […]
