Recently, I watched footage of some of Amarillo (TX) ISD’s top teachers, including Beth Brannon, an English teacher at Caprock High. Beth’s teaching was fascinating and wonderful—full of deftly applied examples of the techniques my team and I study and discuss in Teach Like a Champion workshops, but also totally unique…and sometimes quite unexpected. In my…
Rue Ratray, of UpAcademy Oliver, a district turnaround school in Lawrence, MA is one of the best–and most reflective–teachers I know. He’s been writing a series of guest posts (you can read his others here and here) about teaching. He shared his latest with me this week–it’s a reflection on a phrase neither of us is…
We’ve just finished our chapter on vocabulary in Reading Reconsidered. In it, we describe ways to teach new words directly (Explicit Vocabulary Instruction) and ways to increase how much word knowledge students absorb from reading words in texts (Implicit Vocabulary Instruction). The following is from our discussion of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction and talks about the key…
Colleen, Erica, and I are about to put our manuscript of Reading Reconsidered to bed. One of the most important chapters is on Close Reading, and Close Reading has a definition problem. We set out to start our discussion of it with a rock-solid definition and that process required a bit of Close Reading in and…
Colleen, Erica and I are about to wrap up the manuscript of Reading Reconsidered. One of the most important chapters in it is about Close Reading which, we note, has become an urgent clarion call but remains relatively poorly defined… except here we hope. In the excerpt below, we discuss one of the key tasks of…