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Posts from the ‘From the Classroom’ Category

Dec 21

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From the Classroom: Reading Conferences + Building a Professional Reader’s Toolbox

By Brittany Carlino

“Ms. C, I am giving up on post-it notes!” It is a Friday after school and I’m sitting beside Lily*, one of my brightest and most motivated students, and we are giggling about how much we hate when post-it notes stick out of our books too far.

Lily is here for a reading conference. As part of my Honors 9 Literature class, she’s in the midst of our first outside reading assignment where the kids are independently navigating a text and will have to do some writing on it in the end. As the honors kids, they mostly love to read, thus it would be easy to expect they read well. In most cases they do: they comprehend the content and can say interesting things about it. But when it comes to combing through a lengthy, complex novel to write about it with focused, meaningful, positioned points, well, no they can’t. They are 14 after all.  Even for my juniors, this presents challenges.  Read more

Nov 18

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From the Classroom: Toughest to Teach

By Brian Kelley

In preparation for a guest appearance in a Classroom Management course at Temple University, adjunct professor―and PAWLP co-director―Jolene Borgese asked her college students to email questions to me.

One question gnaws at me. For several days I have felt the need to write about it: Which students are toughest for you to teach? How do you address those students?

If I answered this question twenty years ago, I would have said the resistant students. My answer is different today. Yes, even after 20 years, I still find some students tough to teach. And I think I always will.

The toughest students for me are the students whom I do not know.

This one, my friends, is squarely on me. Not on the students.  Read more

Nov 16

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From the Classroom: The Perfect High School Read-Aloud

By Christine Soring

I was thrilled when asked to write for the PAWLP blog and immediately knew that I wanted to write about my new passion: children’s books. It wasn’t until I participated in grad school and the Writing Institute that I discovered a new love for children’s books. Why didn’t I think of this before? The versatility of these books is so powerful and something that I have been regretting not using before. My new goal this year: use children’s books as mentor texts for all aspects of writing.  Read more

Oct 21

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From the Classroom: Notes from PCTELA

By Tricia Ebarvia

pctela“What conference is it again?”

“Pic TELL ah,” I said more slowly.

“Really? That’s not a real conference,” my colleague teased.

All I could do was smile.

To the uninitiated, PCTELA―short for the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English Language Arts―might sound like something you would make up. Or, at the very least, just another one of the many educational acronyms in our lives: SAT, ACT, PVAAS, IEP, GIEP, RTI. I have to admit that until a few years ago, I had never heard of PCTELA either. In fact, when I first started teaching in 2001, I don’t think I had heard of many professional teacher organizations, if any. Or, if I did, they didn’t register with me. I was probably too busy just trying to stay afloat in the happy chaos of teaching.

Soon enough—and thankfully—other acronyms became part of my teaching life. NCTE, NWP, PAWLP—these were the acronyms that mattered. And now, of course, I can add PCTELA to that list.  Read more

Sep 23

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From the Classroom: The Power of the Booktalk

By Tricia Ebarvia

Although I’d been doing some form of independent reading for several years, with each year better than the one before, I came into last school year determined to commit in a way I hadn’t before. I wanted to find a way to make students’ independent reading a core component of their learning rather than something they did “on the side” or “in addition to” what we were doing in class.

Was I successful? I think so. Certainly there’s always room for improvement, but when I look back at last year, my 9th grade students together read more than 1000 books. That’s 1000 books in addition to the whole class novels they were assigned. That’s 1000 books I’m sure that would have gone unread had I not made the time in class for students to develop independent reading habits.
Read more

Aug 19

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From the Classroom: Three Things to do in the First 48 Hours

By Tricia Ebarvia

Glance at almost any education focused website, blog, or Twitter feed in mid-August and you’ll find no shortage of first-day-of-school activities. In one of my education-related Facebook groups, someone recently asked for suggestions on how to spend the first day in class. Others asked about how much time to spend on community building activities versus how soon to jump into the curriculum. Not surprisingly, opinions varied, as they should.

As for me, I’ve spent less time reviewing the syllabus each year and more time on doing things that will get us reading, writing, and talking more quickly. My goals for the first two few days of school, then, include the following:

  1. Give students a general overview of the course
  2. Set up the classroom environment
  3. Learn about student preferences and interests

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