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…
Theme, I’ve always thought, is one of the most important concepts we (English and reading teachers, I mean) teach and also one that almost no one can really define. This should probably suggest that we don’t understand it very well either. And this is cause for concern. We all talk about theme… but can we define…
Those of you who have been to our reading workshops are up-to-date on “Embedded Non-fiction”—the idea of teaching non-fiction by combining it with a novel. Rather than reading de-contextualized articles to practice reading non-fiction—the Civil War today; the naked mole rat tomorrow—you’d choose topics that develop and add depth to topics raised by the novel you’re…