Argumentative writing in the ELA classroom How do educators continue to reflect on their own teaching while preparing students to be career and college ready with 21st century skills and higher order thinking skills? The call for integrating technology into our middle school classrooms seems like an easy strategy. Smartboards, Smart TVs, Chromebooks, iPads …
How to engage teacher teams in whole-school literacy and learning improvement It’s 7:30 Tuesday morning and groups of teachers are sitting in their first meeting of the year for their professional learning communities (PLCs). Thick binders filled with colored tabs and volumes of files of student literacy achievement data are in front of them. Teachers
Read More… from A Journey for Content Area Literacy Development and PLCs
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How poetry written from a new perspective deepens knowledge and encourages synthesis of new ideas 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 comprehension of texts—fiction and nonfiction—in all disciplines. Reader response compels readers to interact with the text
Read More… from After-Reading Response: “I Am” Poetry for Synthesizing Text
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Erik M. Francis, M.Ed., M.S. is an author, educator, and speaker who specializes in teaching and learning that promotes cognitive rigor and postsecondary (college and career) readiness. He is the author of Now THAT’S a Good Question! How to Promote Cognitive Rigor Through Classroom Questioning (ASCD). He is also the owner of Maverik Education LLC, providing academic
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How one South Texas school district is taking middle school reading comprehension to another level Nearly six million middle school students today are reading below grade level—a shocking number. The National Center for Education Statistics’ 2017 report, The Nation’s Report Card: Mathematics and Reading Assessments, shows minimal improvement in reading scores for middle school students on
Read More… from Laptops: A Tool to Improve Reading Comprehension
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Using code-switching to improve writing IMHO, LOL, OIC, OMG. If you’ve recently graded middle school or high school writing, chances are you’ve read terms like these; or my favorite, “wtf – idk” which also happened to be an answer on a student’s quiz. As a middle school English teacher, I became more and more perplexed to
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