Sarah J. Donovan, PhD (s/her)

Top Ten Books to Start a Classroom Library (Plus Ten More)

As junior high English teachers, we see how the push to standardize curriculum and prepare for tests has us spending more time in meetings and reviewing data than reading the latest young adult novels. We ask students to be “readers,” but are we even keeping up with the latest titles or up-and-coming authors? This school year, we wanted to do something for our students and ourselves to make reading class, well, about the power and joy of reading again. We wanted students to find their way back to books this year. We wanted to find our way back to books this year — to be readers again.

Almost-free writing: topics, form, process, and publication without a teacher

How can we make writing pedagogy more free? How can we make conscious in students their thoughts and desires so that they can create their own writing life?

The Teacher Continuum: From Hermit to RockStar

Do you have suggestions for building faculty community? Do you think the social events are important or can community be built one relationship at a time? Do you think school faculty relationships necessarily have to extend beyond the school day?

Hope (and Golf) in the Time of PARCC

In this season of testing, teachers can easily sink into disillusionment with our institution. We may feel that the federal government, state, school, and principals are “doing this to us” or “putting students through this,” see the injustices of many hours of testing and less instruction, and believe we have no recourse. However, we forget that we are part of the institution and can shape its structures. For me, that means taking this opportunity to visit the classrooms of my colleagues, see my students in different settings, and, above all, notice the hope around me.

Standards-Based What?

I’d rather not replace letter scores with number scores in this standards-based grading movement. Students tend to see the 5 (or whatever score is highest) as they did the “A,” and they will until we talk about learning in much more nuanced and complex ways — the ways that defy measurement and conflation of learning into a number or letter.

Recording Students’ Book Groups: An Alternative to More Testing

Audio files of students’ discussions are artifacts of evidence, evidence of thinking and making meaning that is difficult to capture in a written assignment or test.

A Letter Home about “Grades”

It is the end of my second quarter minimizing grades and focusing on feedback. Here is the letter I emailed to parents explaining what the letters mean for our reading class on the grade reports going home today. 7th Grade Reading Hello, Parents, Guardians, and …

Getting on the Bus by Donalyn Miller

“For the children we serve, we may be their only reading role models. Even when family members read, many parents rely on teachers and librarians to recommend books for their children. If we are charged with fostering children’s literate lives, it follows we should know …

Assessment in the No-Grades Writing Workshop: What did you write? What did you learn?

Write about what we’ve done in writing class since midterm and what you learned. This is the first sentence of the “final exam” in our seventh grade writing workshop this quarter. This school year, as I discussed in last week’s post about assessment in the reading …

“English not only helps us understand the world, but ourselves.”

by Fidan Malikova As a 15 year-old freshmen in high school, I have had quite an experience with writing. I write for the newspapers at my school,which is called Cutlass. It is an amazing experience in which I get to work with such wonderful people, and …