A couple of weeks ago I shared a picture of Jo Facer at Michaela school. She’d used a list of sophisticated verbs that added depth and nuance to discussion about what a text “showed” to expand her students vocabulary and precision when discussing texts. The idea resonated with lots of folks so I am happy to…
If you’ve seen the first two clips I’ve shared from Nicole Willey’s classroom at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Elementary Academy, you’ll be thrilled to know there’s still more to come– and that the clip I’m sharing today might just be the most replicable of the batch. Nicole’s Check for Understanding was pretty killer. Her positive touch was…
Today’s been a banner day- we’ve spent it with 50 or so teachers from across Uncommon Schools, talking about how to make writing more rigorous in the classroom and to help ensure that it supports broad and strong literacy skills. One of our topics was Show Call, but since Uncommon teachers are already experienced Show Call…
Had the pleasure, Monday, of meeting with Judith Hochman, whose Hochman Writing Method has been profiled extensively (for example here) for its remarkable results. By the end of our meeting, my notebook was full of double-underlined insights describing tools for teaching writing better and the nature of the connection between writing and reading. But I keep…
When you finally get your hands on TLaC 2.0, technique #36 (or thereabouts) will be something you didn’t see in the first edition of the book: Show Call. The idea was developed by teachers at Uncommon who adapted Cold Call with a view to building incentive for students to do top quality work when writing or…