Colleen, Erica and I were so excited to find ourselves in the pages of the thought-provoking journal EducationNext this morning. We chatted about Reading Reconsidered with Marty West for 15 minutes or so on his podcast and the magazine ran a short excerpt from chapter three of the book where we discuss the connection between background…
A friend is spending the day observing training with Habitat for Humanity International. She notes: When they present certain PD sessions, they provide each participant a stamped envelope at the beginning to be addressed. At the end, they give the participants a note card. They ask them to write on the front the key takeaways they…
Chapter two of Reading Reconsidered discusses Close Reading. There’s a lot to discuss, some of which I’ve shared in other blog posts (also here and here). But here, I just want to share the rationale. To Erica Colleen and me, there are three especially compelling reasons why Close Reading is so important: First, Close Reading helps defend…
Paraphrase, Colleen, Erica and I point out in Reading Reconsidered, is not the same as summary. A paraphrase is a restatement of the sentence in simpler, clarified terms that still capture all of the explicit meaning and as much of the connotation as possible. A paraphrase recreates a facsimile of the passage from the narrator’s point…
I was going through some old blog posts this morning and stumbled upon a hidden gem. A comment by the late Grant Wiggins that was, like most things he did, hugely insightful and deeply humble. Really it’s worth a post of its own. Grant was writing in response to this blog post about “disciplined discussions” in which…