Family engagement is tricky business. We work hard at that in education, but I wonder if we need to allow ourselves to think a little bit differently about this critical responsibility and privilege that falls to us as 21st century educators. Engaging families in the culture of a campus is more than sending home newsletters …
With this post, the five-part series on creating an environment that supports strategy transfer comes to an end. That would be the end of the blog series—not the conversation, however. There is much more to discuss. (You can read the first four in this series here, here, here and here.) In this final piece on …
In the three previous posts on strategy transfer (here, here and here), we looked at the elements of creating a system whereby students engage in the powerful work of moving from single use of a teacher-coached strategy to the independent, autonomous use of the most effective strategies chosen from a repertoire at the appropriate time …
Creating a coaching system and teaching a repertoire of strategies are the first two steps in creating an environment where students can move toward independence in applying comprehension strategies. These two components of strategy transfer in reading instruction were addressed here and here. The third critical element in designing a system for strategy transfer is …
I hear it all the time–“My students do a great job applying specific strategies during instruction, but when they are on their own, they struggle to apply the strategies they’ve learned and practiced.” Teachers work tirelessly teaching and modeling thinking strategies during reading instruction. Students work hard learning and applying those strategies as they read …
There’s a lot of buzz in the education world about ways to motivate students to read, but what about enticing teachers to read more children’s literature? The life of a teacher is packed with responsibilities inside and outside the classroom, but making time to read a wide variety of children’s/teen’s books is vitally important. There …
Each summer, students in poverty fall further and further behind in their reading progress during the summer break. The problem is that children from low-income neighborhoods simply don’t have access to books in the ways that kids from middle class homes do. It’s a complex issue, but it’s possible there’s a solution in as few …
