Topic: Video

Knowing our students helps us to choose the most useful resources for them and to make every moment of our precious instructional time count.

Our vision for book clubs continues to be a work in progress. It is informed by our own experiences and our ongoing dialogue with fellow educators.

If children are to develop as a learning community, they must believe that their efforts to engage with each other and with ideas matter.

If we accept that discomfort is inevitable but silence is not a strategy, what practices or systems in your school can you examine in order to confront and change outcomes for students of color?

How do we find helpful new resources without squandering funding or instructional time?

Lester and Katie offer a framework that can both deepen and broaden students’ understandings, insights, and empathy for the greater human family.

To learn together, children need to figure out how to live in the confined space of a classroom, developing processes that enable them to navigate their environment, and each other, with care, respect and trust.

Think about aligning beliefs and practices not within the classroom, but in your personal life.

Talk has a purpose—and that purpose is to tackle the unknown—to strategize, to innovate, to problem-solve, to construct understanding. This use of talk “in the wild” frames the “why” behind purposeful talk in the classroom—our rationale for designing teaching and learning that’s dialogic in nature.

The Comprehension Toolkit series offers robust instruction to encourage students to develop the reading comprehension skills that lead to lifelong learning. See what's inside in this unboxing video!

When the reader stands in his or her own worldview, unable to see or conceive of any other perspective, a book can be a bridge. The right book, at the right time, can span the divide between where the reader stands in this moment and alternate views, new ideas, and options not yet considered.

The teaching of phonics is a means to an end. Children need to decode in order to independently read and write. Phonics shouldn’t feel like an interruption or detour away from these authentic experiences. Phonics should be the building of a curiosity.

We want to build a bridge for children—a bridge between what we are doing in class and the lives that they lead outside of class. We want to be able to show kids how each skill we teach in class makes life right now better outside of class.

An Assessment Conference offers you a little time to study a reader along a number of different dimensions, considering a variety of possible goals.

In the online resources for A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences, you will find a variety of note-taking forms and other documents that will help you get started implementing—or refining—reading conferences right away in your classroom.

The classroom library is the home of a class’ reading community. Like any remodeling project, it is best to make a plan that is real but achievable for the situation at hand. We always advise not to take on more than you can finish in the amount of time you have to do it.

I still believe that conferring is where the magic happens—it’s the heartbeat of the literacy block. It’s an essential time for teachers to meet with students, tailor instruction to their individual goals, provide them with meaningful feedback, and grow relationships.

We already accept notetaking as a part of classroom life, so let’s welcome sketchnotes into the notetaking family! Notetaking as a practice stands the test of time, and for good reason. Research suggests that taking notes in real time and thinking about those notes later boosts student learning.