At our recent Ratio workshop in London we shared this sample page from a student work packet. It’s designed to help structure a student discussion about a text, though it could be adapted to any content. The idea is that it asks students to write a response to a discussion question before they discuss it. Then…
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…
I watched an interesting lesson today, a pretty good one, in which the teacher asked her students to describe the setting of Amy Tan’s short essay “Fish Cheeks.” When one student did so—describing it as a “weird and different Christmas,” the teacher asked him for evidence to support his claim. When he provided it, she asked…
As many of you know I’m in the midst of revising Teach Like a Champion to reflect all the things champion teachers have taught me since I wrote the first version four years ago. This morning–temperature in the single digits, wind whipping at the windows in the pre-dawn darkness; I felt like a novelist!–I was writing…
I’m back from vacation. That means goodbye for now to swimming in the river with my kids and falling asleep to the plurp of tree frogs at night, but it means hello again to video meetings with the team at Taxonomy Towers, so there’s that. Today we watched video of several teachers including North Star High School’s…