Skip to content

Mar 8

2 Comments

Tool of the Trade: Technology as Teacher’s Pet

by Rita Sorrentino

How would you respond to the following poll?imgres.jpg

  • Were you ever considered a teacher’s pet in your K-12 learning years?
  • As a teacher, were you ever criticized for favoring a particular student over others?

Recently, on a late-afternoon ride to center-city Philadelphia via Market-Frankford Line, I overheard two adolescent girls commiserating about their day: a boring class, too much homework, unfair dress codes, and the existence of a teacher’s pet in a certain class. The first three complaints did not surprise me, but I was curious about the latter. With rubrics and standards for assignments, behavior and competencies, I would have thought the term “teacher’s pet” was no longer front and center in a repertoire of these students’ pet peeves.

Undoubtedly, both teachers and students face a plethora of pressures in their daily interactions with curriculum content, expectations, evaluations and communication. For the most part, policies and procedures are in place to support a healthy teaching and learning environment. However, preparation and planning make great demands on teachers’ time. Schoolwork, homework, and extracurricular activities often leave students with little time for relaxation and socialization. Fortunately, in today’s educational landscape, both teachers and students have access to apps and web tools to help make teaching and learning more manageable and meaningful.

Practical Ed Tech

Richard Byrne is one of my favorite go-to persons for all things edtech. In addition to Free Technology for Teachers, he also maintains iPadApps4School.com and PracticalEdTech.com.  Richard Byrne believes that technology has the power to improve student engagement and achievement. It enables teachers to form powerful, global, professional learning communities. Read more

Mar 2

1 Comment

FOR SALE: An Assessable Writing Process

By Pam DeMartino

In the real estate industry, housing is the sellable commodity. People want a house, or an apartment, or a building within which to operate a dream.  Realtors market these living quarters by highlighting the square footage, updated amenities, and location, location, location. Buyers will also be told when the structure was built, but curiously, not how the structure was built. Documentation of the building process remains buried amidst the title documents because it is the dwelling – the finished construct – that possesses the tradable worth.

As I listened to my colleague’s discourse during one of our department meetings, I realized that we, as secondary educators, are increasingly taking part in this type of real estate market with regard to student writing.  We devote time and attention only to the final pieces of student writing: the polished or publishable draft.  It is that typed and neatly stapled paper that carries the tradable worth in our departments; only the end of the building process garners our assessment. Rubrics and scoring guides separate organization, focus, details and other discrete aspects of the finished paper, failing in all respects to give recognition to the building of the literary publication. Read more

Mar 1

3 Comments

Teacher to Teacher: Mining Your Writer’s Notebook

By Lynne R. Dorfman

According to Ayres and Shubitz (2010, 101), “Writer’s notebooks are the open-arms that pull students into writing.” They talk about the value of reflecting on everyday living and ordinary moments. Every human being is a story teller. Each day we wake up with a brand-new page to write on. It is a page in the story of our lives, making our day-to-day experiences important and worth writing about. Fletcher (2001, 26) says that most professionals consider a writer’s notebook as essential to their writing process. For us, it is a place where we can write and share pieces of our writing with our students so they can see us as writers, too.  For our students, it is a place where they can engage in risk taking since notebook entries are not graded. As we guide students to return to their notebooks as often as possible, we are helping them to lead a writerly life and establish their unique writer’s identity.

The value in a writer’s notebook is not simply writing in it every day or nearly every day. The true value of a notebook is to be able to return to it whenever you like, for myriad purposes. To mine a notebook, you probably should keep one for at least three weeks or so. Try writing in it to record observations, make lists, try out memory chains, hand maps, heart maps, and neighborhood maps. Create snapshots with words of people, places, and objects. Read more

Feb 22

1 Comment

Approaches to Argument in an Era of Alternative Facts

by Tricia Ebarvia

Given the state of today’s political discourse and the complex challenges presented by social media sharing (and over sharing), it’s more important now than ever for teachers to take an active role in helping students navigating the information and misinformation they encounter every day. At this point, many of us might be already familiar with the Stanford study published a few months ago that found that many students cannot discern the difference between stories that are real and those that are not. As the Washington Post reported, “Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website.”

And it isn’t just students either. Even well-educated adults fall for fake news stories. Just this morning, on my Facebook feed, a friend posted a news story that turned out to be false (someone in the comments had done a fact check). Unfortunately, too often fake news sites have become adept at posing as legitimate sources. Now, when I see a news story from an unfamiliar source, the first thing I do is try to determine where it’s coming from. As literacy teachers, we can no longer just teach our students the traditional Rs of reading and writing. We need to also teach our students about third R—Rhetoric.

Rhetoric is the study of persuasion, and today, there are plenty of individuals, friends, family, interest groups, politicians, corporations, and any number of organizations trying to persuade our students—to buy this, believe that, do this, don’t do that. Information that seems purely objective can be interpreted (or manipulated) in the service of persuasion. Even the youngest students can (and should) be taught to analyze text to look for biases. Just a few weeks ago, my six-year-old came home and told me about how his class was learning the difference between fact and opinion. Of course, teachers have always done this work, but the times seem to call for more. So how? How can we teach our students be critical thinkers, especially of information that might feed into our own biases?  Read more

Feb 20

1 Comment

Books on the Blog: Who Done It Books

by Linda Walker

pic1.jpgWho Done It books help young readers and writers make inferences and draw conclusions. The opening pages of The First Case by Ulf Nilsson, a celebrated Swedish children’s author, illustrated by Gitte Spee, generates the questions of why is squirrel hurrying through the deep snow and what is the destination. The accompanying text arouses interest…” Wretched thieves!” cried a small creature as it scurried through the snow. “Thieving wretches!” It was late in the evening and the whole forest was asleep. It was snowing softly and beautifully. “Monstrous plunderers!” called the little animal in a trembling, squeaky voice. “Plundering monsters!” Read more

Feb 9

1 Comment

Tools of the Trade: Introducing Nonfiction Notice and Note Signposts


by Kelly Virgin

9780325050805.jpgIn their Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst write: “Fiction invites us into the writer’s imagined world; nonfiction intrudes into ours and purports to tell us something about it.” Now, perhaps more than ever, it is important that we teach our students how to navigate this intrusion and how to challenge the “truths” of nonfiction writing. In this book, Kylene and Bob share a scaffolded approach to teaching students how to do just this. Their strategies can easily be adapted to any grade level from high elementary to secondary.

My 9th through 11th grade students have found great success with the strategies this year. I started by encouraging them to ask themselves the three big questions: What surprised me? What did the author think I already knew? What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I knew? By asking these questions, students started thinking more in depth about the nonfiction articles we read together and our conversations went beyond just comprehension and regurgitation of facts.

Read more

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →