Chapter 8 of Reading Reconsidered describes tools teachers can use to build Intellectual Autonomy… students’ ability to ask and answer their own questions of a text. One of the tools we describe in the book is the literary analysis protocol, an exercise where a teacher regularly gives students a short passage from a book and asks…
My colleague and Practice Perfect co-author Katie Yezzi was the founding principal of Troy Preparatory Charter School here in upstate New York and is now a senior instructional leader at Uncommon Schools. She recently visited a school and observed one of those “might have been” moments–a lesson that was so close and yet so far. She’s been…
“Students say I’m strict, but I don’t write referrals. How is that?” Peter D. Ford, a teacher I admire, recently tweeted. There’s something deeply important to reflect on in his words. In the classroom, as in medicine, prevention always beats cure. What you want is not so much the ability to fix it when students are…
Here are the first three paragraphs of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story, “Harrison Bergeron”: HARRISON BERGERON THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was…
The first moment of your class is in many ways the most important in setting expectations for what will happen there for the next hour. That’s why I love this clip of Alonte Johnson starting his 7th grade English class at King’s Collegiate in Brooklyn. He’s clear and direct. His routines are simple and efficient. He…