Innovation Summit Participants, This post walks you through the process of implementing a story exchange and biographical narrative writing in your classroom, but we are going to actually go through the process together in our workshop, so save this website for later and just click …
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 …
There is a big brown envelope in my school mailbox on Tuesday. I order a lot of books from Amazon, but this is not from Amazon; it is from Harvard Press. Inside are two copies of the book Inside Our Schools: Teachers on the Failure …
“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 …
At Ethical ELA, we believe in the power of writing to inform and transform. We write to write; to reflect on our teaching; to recognize that for change to happen, we have to act deliberately; to challenge the status quo; to celebrate the “good” in …
I have found that before people can accept and value diversity in others, they need to first see similarities. Teachers and students need to learn more than each others’ names; it vital that they learn about each other, who they are. It is important that teachers help students to forge new friendships, for each class to form an “Us,” rather than and “Us” and “Them.”
National Poetry Month comes around every April, and it is a time to remember and to celebrate poetry as writers, as readers, as human beings. Most ELA teachers know that reading poems and writing poems go hand in hand. Still, not everyone has uncovered and …
The blank page is daunting for any writer. Talking in front of peers in middle school might be even more so. A picture, however, can do the talking for us, and once it does, the writing comes. Take a look at my drawing. Yes, look, please. …
There’s no time for fiction in English classes these days. Argument and argumentative essays were all the rage last year, and I don’t see that movement slowing down. Did you notice the nonfiction teacher books and resources being passed around your school and the new …