My colleague Maggie Johnson has been leading our work with a network of inner city Catholic schools in NYC. We’ve learned a lot and have been plenty inspired. Maggie shared this update: We’ve just wrapped our second year of work with Partnership Schools, six pre-K through 8th grade Catholic schools that serve over 2,000 primarily low-income…
My colleague Josh Phillips had one project he was most passionate about this year: Camp Uncommon– which involved running two week summer camp for 115 of our middle school students from five cities on the campus of Maine’ s Colby College this past summer. To say is was a success is an understatement so I asked…
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…
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…