Topic: Video

Struggle is how we learn. Rich tasks provoke productive struggle, during which students actively struggle through a problem as they work to make sense of it.

Our aim should be to ensure that every minute is packed with thinking, reading, writing, lots of talk, and lots of books. To that end we need to reexamine the assumption that students can read only one book at a time.

Before you get started on your journey of making books in writing workshop, there are a few things you need to know about the practice.

What happens if we under scaffold a child and he’s not successful? We work with the child to fix it. Everyone—every child in our readers’ workshop, every teacher, every adult, every human—fails and is disengaged at some point.

Understanding as you're reading helps you to engage with the text, read accurately, read with fluency, understand what the author is saying, and think beyond the text. In essence, comprehension is everything.

Begin conferences by asking students an open-minded question that invites them to talk about what they're doing as writers.

Confident readers know how to choose books. Which is not to say that we are immune to error. Every avid reader has experienced book droughts where nothing you pick up has what you are looking for.

When you ask the question, 'How’s it going?' at the beginning of writing conferences, you’re doing much more than inviting students to talk about what they’re doing as writers. The question initiates your relationship with each student and deepens each of these relationships.

In the process of writing reading responses, the importance of choice cannot be understated. Students feel like they are in control of their responses; they can view the text through whatever lens they choose.

With the practice of reading response writing, students do not have to answer specific questions with definitive answers. Instead, they can read with presence, and decide at the end what aspect they would like to respond to.

Taking ownership of our teaching and children’s learning changes everything. We own it when things go well, and we own it when they don’t.

In math, children are solving problems, and the journey to a solution is more valuable than the destination. Conferring in math asks, “Where are you?” and “Where could you go next?” rather than “Where should you be?” or “What would I do next?”

Educators have relied on levels as a valuable tool to help them match students to texts they can read independently with fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. However, the truth is that leveling books and using levels as a tool to match students to texts isn’t as straightforward as we might hope

It is often difficult to imagine how students can move from where they are to the longer papers they will need to write. This book shows the way forward, with invitations wide enough, attractive enough, and manageable enough—that students will, I believe, decide they no longer need to hide.

Understanding Texts & Readers works in conjunction with The Reading Strategies Book, and helps you connect comprehension goals to text levels and reading responses.

Choice within routines and environment is essential for instilling agency. Without choice, children are blindly following our rules and expectations.

The goal of a writing conference is to teach students something about writing that they can use in the future. If you add to students' writing repertoires in every conference, they become better writers over time.

Sometimes it can be hard to imagine how you might infuse deeper comprehension work into your district- mandated curriculum or instructional framework. If this sounds familiar...