Engaging middle school learners in metaphoric thinking through self-expressive prompts Everyday Leadership Object Prompt A Please take a few minutes to think about characteristics of leaders you know and respect. Then choose an object from the table that represents a quality or characteristic you value in a leader. Be prepared to explain to classmates why
Offering diverse texts as well as justice-focused critiques of traditional literature On the first day of school in Chicago, I encountered a room full of Iraqi, Nepalese, and West African refugee students. Timid, cautious, and nervous, they sat in Room 34 with visible trepidation. Someone with an equal level of trepidation? Me. I was a
Read More… from Be Radical: Reimagining the 8th Grade Literary Canon
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A teacher’s guide to planning a high-interest, engaging writing project Three years ago an eighth grade class of mine had a blog project called “Dear Terrorist” where students researched their topics and wrote letters to anyone considering (or participating in) a decision that could harm themselves or others. One girl wrote an open letter to
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We stood in the empty classroom. Lisa looked up at me. “I couldn’t understand what I read last night,” she said. I looked at her, speechless. The class was reading a novel, and I wondered why Lisa had been failing the daily quizzes. These were genuine “right-there” questions, designed only to see if the students
Read More… from Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop
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The benefits of using graphic novels in the social studies classroom The standards in current education reform movements stress the importance of strengthening students’ content-area literacy skills. This means that social studies teachers must draw on powerful texts. The problem is that many students enter our classrooms lacking an interest in reading. One type of
Read More… from Using Graphic Novels to Open the Gateway for Struggling Readers
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Much of the writing we assign our students is public writing—writing to communicate with others. Writing-to-learn is personal writing—writing that helps students increase their comprehension of texts in all disciplines. The 2000 report of the National Reading Panel states, “Teaching students to use …writing to organize their ideas about what they are reading is a
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