Over the next couple of months, I’m going to be posting some excerpts from Reading Reconsidered here on Field Notes. This is the beginning of Chapter 1, which discusses Text Selection and Text Complexity. Chapter 1: Text Selection One of the most important topics in teaching reading is text selection, the process by which teachers choose…
In their new book The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath describe a principle some high performing organizations use to grow successfully: “Reduce negative variance and increase positive variance.” This idea is relevant in at least two aspects of running and improving schools. First, one of the strongest ways a school can make a difference…
Over the next couple of months, I’m going to be posting some excerpts from Reading Reconsidered here on Field Notes. This is the beginning of Chapter 5, which discusses how and how much students read. Reading Reconsidered: Chapter 5 Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better Consider, for a moment, how much reading you were required…
Navigator Schools is a small network of two high performing schools in California: Gilroy Prep in Gilroy and Hollister Prep in Hollister. Their results have been tremendous and yesterday I stumbled on a training video they’d made that I thought was fantastic. Not only that—I thought it provided a critical insight into how to train…
The TLAC team and I are heading to New Orleans after Winter Break, doing a two-day updated Engaging Academics workshop on January 11th and 12th. We’re excited to be presenting- it’s one of our best workshops–maybe the ideal ‘introduction to TLAC workshop–but this one should be especially interesting as it includes a few significant changes that…