Little Things Have Big Muscles: On the Teach Like a Champion team, that’s our motto. Aliquam magna est res musculi in Latin, apparently. First draft of the Coat of Arms below. Comments welcome. But seriously, in analyzing the classroom materials of teachers at Leadership Prep Bed Stuy Middle Academy the other day we found one of…
Rue Ratray, an English teacher at Boston’s high-performing Brooke Charter Schools, sent me a note this morning to ask about embedding non-fiction. He’s reading The Giver with his 6th graders, and anyone reading The Giver pretty much gets my immediate attention. (It’s my favorite work of youth fiction, as I discussed here.) Rue was wondering about the…
Writing a book on reading and being a dad aren’t always tasks that mix well. Manuscripts need to be written on nights and weekends when my goal is to be with my kids. Every once in a while I get to do both things at once, though, which is what’s been happening as I’ve read with…
The premise of Teach Like a Champion you could argue is: When in a pickle, ask a great teacher. All of the useful ideas in it, I borrowed from people who are smarter than me. I’m not really a huge policy guy but really it’s hard to ignore policy when you’re in education. It’s everywhere. So…
Over the past few years I’ve come to believe more and more strongly in the power of the sentence as a tool for developing proficiency in reading and writing. The fundamental problem, for students who don’t write or read as well as they could, is often that they aren’t good enough at creating sentences that capture…