My dad told me once, the mark of a good manager is how well things run when he’s not there. This thought helped guide my teaching life for over 30 years, but it has never been more tested than now, in the time of Covid-19. If
When I speak with other teachers about feedback, one of the main concerns I hear is that the feedback we give students — feedback we pour countless hours into — seems to have little impact on student growth. I know this frustration well, and for many
My youngest daughter and I are list makers. We make lists before we go to the grocery store, when we pack, and as we consider our tasks for the day. Our lists help us organize ourselves within our too-much-to-do lives. Lately, I’ve been talking to
“A good beginning makes a good ending” goes the old English proverb. And likewise: “Work well begun is work half done.” The most effective teachers don’t take student engagement for granted. Yet in our work in classrooms, we see that not enough attention is paid to good beginnings; this lack
There are three things that we know pretty clearly about feedback: If delivered well, feedback can be one of the most transformative teaching tools in a teacher’s toolbox. (Hattie and Clarke, 2018) Far too much feedback, however, is not delivered well, and thus it has
We find the same issues cropping up in conversations with thousands of teachers across the U.S. You face a high-stakes conundrum when it comes to planning instruction: either create curriculum from scratch, cobbling together their own resources with ones from online repositories that have little to no quality control OR follow a mandated, scripted
This is Balanced Literacy. The idea of balanced literacy is a relic from the reading war days; it used to be understood as simply reading and writing—and there is a connection there. But balanced literacy is so much more than that—it’s an entire approach to literacy
By about this time of the year, most teachers have experienced the sensation of playing Whack-A-Mole: They keep addressing and re-addressing the students who aren’t quite where they should be when they should be, and then, by the time those students are in their places, other
Balanced literacy is more than grouping students, as my colleague Doug Fisher pointed out in his blog. But grouping for instruction is important and, sadly, neglected. If our goal is to ensure that students can read and comprehend texts independently, then we need data about the barriers each student
We know that reading is imperative for building great writers. We also are beginning to discover and practice the ways that writing is a critical component to creating great readers. For instance, we know that children, even in the earliest grades, often write before they read -- and students can read any word they