Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I are busy wrapping up the manuscript of our new book on literacy, Reading Reconsidered. We’ll put it to bed in a few weeks’ time and you should see it on shelves next winter. In the meantime here’s an excerpt from the chapter on Close Reading. The topic is something called…
We had our weekly video meeting at TLaC towers today. The highlight was an amazing pair of clips that Joaquin Hernandez cut and edited of Sari Fromson, a 5th grade math teacher at Boston’s Roxbury Prep. The first clip was shot this spring and shows beautiful and autonomous Systems and Routines in Sari’s classroom. As the…
This morning my daughter (6) successfully decoded the words “exotic” & “species” when she saw them in print for (I assume) the first time. She struggled to get halfway through exotic and then suddenly she got it. “Ex… ex-OAT… ex-AH… exotic!” She succeeded, to make an obvious but important point, because she already knew those words….
Amazing Engaging Academic workshop in Denver this week. We loved talking about the craft of teaching with teachers from Denver, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Charlotte and a score of other places. One of the highlights came during a break. I noticed that Charlie Friedman, the principal of Nashville Classical, was writing, and I asked what he was…
Rue Ratray is Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at UP Academy Oliver in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a district turnaround that’s one part of superintendent Jeff Riley’s bold efforts to revitalize the schools in this small former mill city that’s (previously) been known for under-performing schools. Rue’s an amazing and inspirational teacher. You can see video of him…