The first moment of your class is in many ways the most important in setting expectations for what will happen there for the next hour. That’s why I love this clip of Alonte Johnson starting his 7th grade English class at King’s Collegiate in Brooklyn. He’s clear and direct. His routines are simple and efficient. He…
Colleen, Erica and I were so excited to find ourselves in the pages of the thought-provoking journal EducationNext this morning. We chatted about Reading Reconsidered with Marty West for 15 minutes or so on his podcast and the magazine ran a short excerpt from chapter three of the book where we discuss the connection between background…
A friend is spending the day observing training with Habitat for Humanity International. She notes: When they present certain PD sessions, they provide each participant a stamped envelope at the beginning to be addressed. At the end, they give the participants a note card. They ask them to write on the front the key takeaways they…
Chapter two of Reading Reconsidered discusses Close Reading. There’s a lot to discuss, some of which I’ve shared in other blog posts (also here and here). But here, I just want to share the rationale. To Erica Colleen and me, there are three especially compelling reasons why Close Reading is so important: First, Close Reading helps defend…
Paraphrase, Colleen, Erica and I point out in Reading Reconsidered, is not the same as summary. A paraphrase is a restatement of the sentence in simpler, clarified terms that still capture all of the explicit meaning and as much of the connotation as possible. A paraphrase recreates a facsimile of the passage from the narrator’s point…