Jen Rugani was a member of our first cohort of TLaC Fellows this past year. She sent us this reflection on the challenges of making writing something students thought of as an art (or at least a craft) and some ideas she’d taken from watching video of colleague (and fellow Fellow) Kirby Jarrell’s class. We think…
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve added a new senior member to our team. Darryl Williams, who was formerly Chief Officer for School Leadership at Houston ISD and who before that was a Regional Superintendent with Achievement First, has joined us as Senior Fellow for School Leadership. I’ve known Darryl and admired his work for a…
Last week I posted some video of Virginia ODP soccer coach Kelvin Jones’ training session with players at his home club in Williamsburg, Va. The video showed some of what made his models so successful and was pretty popular so I thought I’d share a bit more from Kelvin’s session– this time on a different topic….
Batch Process is technique #44 in TLaC 2.0. The idea is that rather than responding to or mediating every student comment during discussion, it can be beneficial to let students talk several times in a row, directly to one another, before you step in to guide or shape. This idea is sometimes referred to as playing…
I recently came across a fascinating blog post by Mike Murphy, who teaches English at Boston’s Nativity Prep. Mike and his colleagues had taken a couple of ideas from Reading Reconsidered and combined them in new ways. The first was text complexity and the idea that there are specific types of text complexity- that Oliver Twist…