I had a great conversation this week with a group of colleagues from TNTP about a concept I only have a not-very-helpful, made-up word to describe: de-silo-fication. The word refers to structuring training so that connected and separate topics don’t seem disconnected, especially when one of them requires urgent and intense focus in the…
I recently stumbled on a short video that a colleague in the UK, ‘MR WJ’ (aka, Lloyd Williams-Jones) made describing three TLAC techniques he uses: Cold Call, No Opt Out, and Show Call. MR WJ TLAC from TLAC Blog on Vimeo. He’s very gracious with the praise… which I appreciate though I am also a bit…
We’re writing a reading curriculum (hooray!) and that means daily review of lesson plans for me, which is great fun and lots of learning. Thought I’d share some examples of how we do it from some recent lessons. Our vocabulary goal is to use lots of active practice to build word knowledge. Start with a…
I’ve blogged about Sensitivity Analysis a couple of times before (here here and here). It’s a Close Reading activity that involves asking students to read a very short passage from a text carefully and then compare it to a similar version in which the teacher has made small changes. To understand those small changes and…
Yesterday was one of the most intellectually intense days I’ve had in some time, and I came to realize some important things about Check for Understanding. I’m going to try to summarize some of them here. 1) Check for Understanding is quite possibly the single most important group of techniques in terms of building relationships…