If you are like many teachers on Facebook and Twitter this summer, you are reading a lot of great PD books about collaboration and technology and new methods and the “best” strategies. Maybe you’ve spent your own money on materials for your classroom library (e.g., color-coded …
What are your favorite middle-grade books? I have some money to buy books for my tenth grade English class. Suggestions? What books would you recommend for reluctant/high-standards freshman readers? In recent weeks, I’ve seen many posts and tweets of this nature and even more responses …
Thank you for your readership of Ethical ELA this school year. Thank you for being my teacher-friend. In a typical school day, the only time teachers may be alone is when we use the restroom (until someone knocks on the door). Still, teaching can feel …
I started the year with 9 weeks of choice reading, planning to alternate choice reading with book groups and core texts throughout the year (inspired by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s work). I did what I planned, but added in a month of poetry reading, so …
“Good afternoon, so this is the final week of the quarter,” I announce to my seventh grade reading class. They have spent the morning with the state mandated PARCC test, and we are in an alternate classroom while the eighth graders take their test. It’s …
Over the summer I asked my dear Facebook teacher friends for advice about how best to maintain a classroom library (see part 1 and part 2). I learned a lot from teachers who had developed great systems with minimal loss at the end of school …
“Hey, Isa! Isa!” I call as I ride the wave of students heading to their lockers before school. Finally, she turns and stops at the next break. “Good morning. I missed you yesterday and thought we could work on your speech for today. Maybe you …
Leo “I can’t stay after school. I gotta pick up my little brother,” Leo says as he comes in at lunch to do a reading assignment. (All names are pseudonyms.) “I understand, but you missed a week of school, and if you can just stay …
For this blog, I offer 11 stories of immigration alongside student voices to make visible the sort of thinking teens are doing about immigration and the social forces that impact lives around the globe. How these books imagine America have everything to do with how our students imagine their world — what it is and what it ought to be.
A seventh grade boy came up to me during reading class the other day, stepping away from his browsing on Goodreads for his next book. He said after reading a review about one book, “This one reviewer said he fell into a deep depression after …