We’re in Albany today with 150 amazing folks at our Reading Reconsidered workshop. Earlier this morning we discussed the five plagues of the developing reader–five common challenges that make complex text difficult for students and that are not captured by quantitative measures of text complexity such as Lexiles. We discussed the example of Lord of the…
This is kind of an exciting announcement. Maybe a scary one too. My team and I have decided to write a Language Arts (i.e. English) Curriculum. We’re going to start with the middle grades (4-8) and expand from there. With a little luck we hope to have it ready for schools to use a year…
We’ve had a series of great conversations this year with out colleague Steve Chiger, Director of 5-12 Literacy at Uncommon Schools. Topic: Knowledge and how to infuse more of it, more successfully into English lessons. One of the challenges of knowledge of course is that all knowledge is not equal. Some things are more important than…
This week I sat down to watch footage of Tamesha McGuire’s Kindergarten at Uncommon’s Kings Elementary in Brooklyn. Now, technically I’m supposed to give Tamesha feedback first before I post anything–she’s a TLAC Fellow and that’s part of the program–but, honestly, I loved this clip so much I couldn’t wait. So with apologies to Tamesha, here’s…
Reference sheets have been a consistent staple of Chemistry class for time immemorial – whether they are the Periodic Table or a sheet of equations, students always have something on their desks to reference and use during class. As part of the TLAC Fellowship, my Uncommon Collegiate College High School colleague Denarius Frazier and I had…