Five Reasons Author Visits Are More Than Just Cool
Reading a book and meeting the author is not just a cool event to shake up the regular school routine--it's a powerful learning opportunity that can affect students academically and personally.
Recently in whole novels Category
October 31, 2018
July 26, 2018
Tips For Selecting a Book For the Whole Class
There is little more difficult than trying to engage a whole class of students in reading a novel that is a poor match for the group. There are things teachers can do to influence the experience in one direction or another, but a great deal rests purely on the book itself...Once we have some possible titles in mind, we need to think through our decisions very carefully, going in with as clear an understanding of what might work really well about the book and what might be challenging or disappointing about it. Below is an excerpt adapted from Whole Novels For the Whole Class: A Student Centered Approach (2014) about five key factors I weigh when I select a book for my whole class to read.
May 29, 2018
Why School Librarians Are the Literacy Leaders We Need
When we cut school librarians and rely solely on teachers to curate classroom libraries, we open the door to several problems and close the door to other key benefits.
April 19, 2018
10 Tips For Helping Students Open Up to Poetry
Every year I have some students who arrive to my class with a fear or dislike of poetry. Spending some time away from deconstruction of meaning of poems has always worked to put these students at ease and allow them to open up to poetry anew.
November 08, 2017
Seven Tips for Student-Driven Discussions of Novels
My favorite part of a whole novel study is the week we hold student-driven discussions of the book. Students have completed reading the whole novel and are eager to share and investigate what they experienced. These inquiry-oriented tips have can also be used with other kinds of texts.
October 11, 2017
A Simple Solution to the 'Do Now Dilemma'
There are two dilemmas I have around the Do Now activity; the first is about silence, and the second is about time. The one simple solution for both problems: reading.
September 14, 2017
Why Short Stories May Not Help Struggling Readers
For teachers looking to build students' confidence and love of reading, especially in the case of reluctant and struggling readers, short stories may not be a great place to start.
June 12, 2017
Urgent Plea To School Leaders: Budget for Books
In this post, I share some examples of teachers explaining how lack of books impacts their planning, and a checklist and suggestions for administrators who want to build a culture of authentic reading in their schools.
April 05, 2017
Five Steps To Revolutionize Whole-Class Novels
In my previous post, I discussed the debate around whether to teach whole class novels. In the field, this conversation can get quite polarized, but we shouldn't be limited to this either/or scenario. As a profession we can do better than a decades old stalemate. I believe we must revolutionize, not drop, the whole class novel. The five strategies below are steps toward that end.
March 15, 2017
What Do We Do About the Whole-Class Novel?
The debate around the use of novels in English classes of all age groups is at least twenty years old, but it remains unresolved, continually bubbling up in blog posts and conversations among a wide range of concerned educators: what do we do about the whole class novel? In this post, I analyze the state of current teaching trends with regard to novels, and offer two propositions for moving the debate forward.
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