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Engaging Classroom Communities:
Belonging, Rigor, and Support as Three Pillars
of a Thinking Classroom

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Engaging Classroom Communities:
Belonging, Rigor, and Support as Three Pillars
of a Thinking Classroom

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From Literacy is a Secondary Right edited by Suzanne Plaut; chapter 9

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The Neuroscience Behind Productive Struggle

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The Neuroscience Behind Productive Struggle

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The Neuroscience Behind Productive Struggle

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Challenging tasks spur the production of myelin, a substance that increases the strength of brain signals. Here are four strategies to incorporate productive struggle into your lessons.

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Productive Struggle is a Learner's Sweet Spot

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Productive Struggle is a Learner's Sweet Spot

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Productive Struggle Is a Learner’s Sweet Spot

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Rigor is a buzzword in today’s educational circles, but there are many misunderstandings about the concept. Although rigor means having high expectations for all students, those expectations must be accompanied by appropriate support. Student success occurs when you create an instructional environment that sets high expectations for each student and provides scaffolding without offering excessive help. The key is to incorporate productive struggle.

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CHALLENGE: Students are less focused and engaged in the classroom.

Teachers, leaders, families, and policymakers have noted with alarm that student engagement has plummeted since schools returned to in-person learning. Many educators perceive that students' attention is constantly diverted by digital distractions, making sustained focus nearly impossible. In fact, a recent poll of 1,400 teachers across grades 4-12 found that 80 percent expressed concerns about students' engagement with classroom learning (Gradient Learning, 2023).

But we know schooling wasn't perfect in 2019; the pandemic and its consequences have highlighted problems that were hiding in plain sight. As practicing K-12 educators who've long written about various aspects of engagement, we believe a significant problem in discussing student engagement lies in how it's measured. Too often, measuring behavioral engagement, like physical signals of attentiveness, compliance in task completion, and the number of clicks on a digital learning platform, takes precedence. Cognitive engagement is routinely overlooked.

Real engagement isn't just engagement of students (signs of attentiveness and fulfilling requirements); it's also engagement by students, evidence that they are interacting with what they learn. Measuring "engagement by" means asking things like, How often do students pose questions about the content (not just task clarification)? Or make connections between ideas and concepts during discussions? Or act upon teacher feedback? Drawing on our experiences as educators and a book two of us coauthored on student engagement (Reeves, Fisher, & Frey, 2023), we offer four C's behind teaching practice that fosters engagement by students, and ways to put these four C's into practice.

1. Connections: Build the Foundation

Students thrive in classrooms filled with positive human connections. Healthy teacher-student relationships have strong potential to accelerate student learning (Hattie, 2023). But it's the student who gauges the quality of the relationship, so their perception matters. Students also feel connected to the learning itself when they perceive it as meaningful. Again, perception is key. We know why the content we're teaching is important, but do students? Two strategies can aid each kind of connection.

We know why the content we're teaching is important, but do students?

First, "campaign" for relationships. Fostering real teacher-student relationships, like most worthwhile efforts, requires frequency, duration, and intensity. So, identify a hard-to-reach student in your class and seek to establish (or rebuild) a relationship with them. Every day, for 10 days in a row, engage in a two-minute conversation with that student-in the hallway, during lunch, or in the bus line. Follow one rule: don't talk about school (Wlodkowski, 1983). Find out about their interests and let them learn a bit about you. Then identify the next student in need of connection and repeat the cycle. Doing this strategically throughout the year helps you continually reinvest in relationships.

The second strategy is baking in relevance. Relevance in learning can play a key role in student engagement-but relevance is mediated by the student's perception of the curriculum's value. At the lowest end of the scale of relevance posited by Stacy Priniski and her colleagues (2018) is personal association. For instance, a science teacher providing instruction about oceans may ask who has been to a beach before. While well-intentioned, the effect is short-lived. Personal usefulness is more sustained; the student sees how they can use what is being taught. That same science teacher might demonstrate how concepts about ocean temperature and wind speed will be used as variables in an upcoming lab experiment on hurricanes. At the highest level of Priniski's continuum is personal identification, in which learners link content to building their present and future identities. Sharing information on the high demand for data scientists and meteorologists could help students connect this content to possible future career identities.

Make relevance an intentional part of your daily practice by telling students why their learning is important. Why are we learning about word spacing in writing? Spaces help our readers read what we've written. Why are we learning about the product property of exponents? Mathematicians use this as a tool to make very large calculations simpler. When possible, link relevance to students' personal interests. Taylor, you're a skateboarder. Check out how lift and thrust make it possible for you to do those big ollies.

2. Conditions: Cultivate a High-Expectations Atmosphere

Students are incredibly sensitive to the expectations of their teacher. In one study, two groups of students in grades 2-7 who had similar levels of reading achievement at the beginning of the year showed markedly different achievement at the year's end (Rubie-Davies et al., 2020). The variable was the teacher's expectations: Students with teachers who overestimated their ability outperformed those whose teachers underestimated their ability.

High-expectations teachers set challenging learning intentions and success criteria, develop academic goals with their students, and rely on heterogeneous grouping. In contrast, low-expectations teachers ask more close-ended, low-level questions, group by ability, spend more time repeating directions, and reserve praise for correct answers (Rubie-Davies et al., 2015). To support high expectations, it's key to pair challenging learning goals with regular feedback so students can monitor their learning. Especially at the beginning of teaching content, assess formatively, using the learning intentions and success criteria in each lesson. Provide students with frequent opportunities to gauge their progress.

Research on teacher expectations reveals that even when low-expectations teachers try to differentiate lessons according to students' learning profiles, they ignore a central principle of differentiation: that the learning students ultimately achieve should remain constant while the paths to get there vary (Tomlinson, 2017). We telegraph low expectations when we accept a lower standard of work from a student in a misguided attempt to be kind. Instead, if a student struggles with the learning intention, scaffold and support their learning. Using heterogeneous groups-with academic diversity in each group-is one way to provide support, especially if a teacher designs group tasks such that collaboration is essential for success success. For instance, a math teacher we work with hosts a 15-minute Mastery Monday each week. Each learning group selects one math problem from last week's challenge set that gave at least some kids in that group difficulty, and the group makes another attempt to solve it together.

A warm classroom climate also supports high-expectations teaching by giving students an emotionally safe space to learn. Pair student feedback with high expectations and warmth: I'm giving you this feedback because I have high expectations for you and I know you can reach them. Use digital voice feedback extensions like Mote so students can hear your supportive tone of voice, not just read your words. And deliberately foster an emotionally supportive peer climate. Students must understand that help-seeking is an essential dimension of learning at high levels. Teachers can create posters with sentence frames for offering and accepting help or create a "help wanted" area in the classroom in which students can post requests. Peers can be taught phrases to say to each other as emotional scaffolds (such as "We can do hard things. Let's keep going") and students can be encouraged to ask themselves: Have I offered help today-and accepted help? Have I asked for help today? Have I politely declined help because I wanted to keep trying?

3. Challenge: Choose Policies that Encourage Persistence

The failure in how educators talk about failure is that while we claim it's essential for learning, grading policies tell students otherwise (Reeves et al., 2023). Teachers tell students a growth mindset is important, but then grade them on every attempt to learn. Students sometimes find themselves so far behind that within a matter of weeks, they realize they can't overcome the point deficit no matter what. Engagement plummets: the hoodie goes up and the head goes down.

Grades are often perceived as a mechanism for motivating disengaged students-but they rarely are. The field knows a lot about what does motivate kids to challenge themselves, including:

Feeling competent at what one is doing.

Understanding the significance of what one is learning.

Receiving actionable feedback about next steps in learning.

Having opportunities to make decisions (Reeves et al., 2023).

Two overall practices help educators revise their grading policies to maximize these research-proven motivators. First, separate product and process. Grades should be used to report academic progress compared to the standards being taught. But in many cases, a single number or letter is used to also convey a stew of non achievement factors, including behavior, attendance, and effort. This practice demotivates many learners.

The solution: Separately grade product criteria (which capture students' academic performance toward goals and reflect how they demonstrated learning) and process criteria (which reflect non achievement data that impact learning, like citizenship, peer relationships, and persistence). A more nuanced grading system makes it possible to report, for instance, that a skilled learner has problematic habits when it comes to collaborating with others-or to acknowledge a student who is not yet achieving at expected levels for his resilience (Guskey, 2020).

Another way to make grading serve motivation is to reconsider what goes in the gradebook. Practice work throughout the unit, such as in-class assignments and homework, should be collected and returned with feedback. However, this is practice, not the game; performance on it shouldn't contribute to the overall points earned. Reserve points for end-of-unit assessments of learning. We've successfully used such competency-based grading practices for 15 years at the school where we work. We also allow students who don't initially earn a passing score to retake another version of the exam after they've completed the unit's homework and attended tutorials (which cultivates persistence, resilience, and help-seeking). Students' motivation is reset because they've received actionable feedback, made a choice about whether to get help, and (hopefully) feel competent.

4. Control: Give It to Students!

Where does control of learning truly reside? Here's the news: it's not with us. Educators can create conditions and use evidence-based teaching practices, but it's the student who's in the driver's seat when it comes to learning. This doesn't mean we should fall back to the "I taught them, but they didn't learn" excuse; it means we should intentionally change instructional practices so that students drive their own learning.

Educators can create conditions and use evidence-based teaching practices, but it's the student who's in the driver's seat when it comes to learning.

Sharing control involves teaching self-regulation. When students have habituated to an external locus of control, they look to us for what to do next; this reduces the teacher to a supervisor of tasks. Strengthening students' internal locus of control requires boosting their self-regulation skills, especially their ability to do six things:

Know their current level of understanding.

Know where they need to go next in learning.

Select tools to guide their learning.

Seek feedback and recognize errors as opportunities to learn.

Monitor their progress and adjust their learning.

Recognize their understanding and teach others (Fisher et al., 2023).

These learning skills accelerate achievement because they cultivate active learning-and give students confidence to take on challenges.

Talk with students individually about their results from initial assessments and learning intentions you've set, to help them understand where they are in their learning and where they are headed. Create more opportunities for students to exercise choice and decision making, and regularly schedule events through which students actively seek feedback. For instance, at a designated time each week, have students leave a piece of work on their desks for their peers to provide feedback. All members of the class rotate from one desk to the next, leaving signed sticky notes offering tips and advice.

A second strategy that helps students control their learning is empowering them to set their own goals. As students develop self-regulatory dispositions, they'll be better equipped to set goals and monitor progress toward them. In conferences, help students, especially disengaged students, formulate self-referenced, "personal best" goals. For example, reluctant readers aren't necessarily going to be motivated by a grade-level Lexile goal that seems too distant. Better to set incremental goals that let them gauge progress, not just mastery ( Your reading gains this last month went from a 240 Lexile to a 280! That's your personal best. What's next?) Equip learners with the means to monitor their own progress, such as tracking how many pages they have read or how many math problems they have completed.

Tuning Them in to Learning

Getting students tuned in to learning requires more than getting them to pay attention and fulfill schoolwork requirements. It means seeing to it that students are enthusiastically engaging with content and fellow learners. Let's set up conditions to encourage such active participation. By thinking beyond the "grades-as-rewards" box in terms of motivation and focusing on the four C's discussed here, we'll increase the odds that students will focus on their learning, no matter the distractions.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ Have you found your students were more easily distracted the last year or so than they were before most schools went all-remote? Why do you think that is?

➛ What steps could you take to help students see greater relevance in their learning? Or to create a "warm" classroom or school climate of high expectations?

Better Learning Through Structured Teaching

An instructional framework any teacher can use to help students to be more successful and self-directed learners.

What to Try When Students Can't Focus

His book acknowledges that getting students to focus can seem like the Holy Grail. Lang shares approaches-from research and his observations of many classrooms-for garnering that attention. Chapters explore five key aspects of learning that compel students' attention: Community (the "least distracted class" Lang observed was one where the teacher regularly drew out all voices and connected students); curiosity; assessment; structure; and novelty (artists of all kind use these last two). Including assessment may seem odd, but many kids do focus when tested. Lang explains how to "take advantage of the attitude-focusing power of graded assessment without the collateral damage grades can cause."

Just as teachers hope to do for students, Lang (director of the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Massachusetts) hopes to draw educators' focus away from "distractions" toward engaging kids:

We've been sidetracked in recent years by assertive voices who lay the entire blame for our distractible natures at the feet of our laptops and phones ... [but] teachers have always wrestled with capturing and sustaining students' attention. We need to turn our heads away from distraction and toward attention. Our challenge is not to wall off distractions, [but] to cultivate attention and help students use it in service of meaningful learning.

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To increase student engagement, think of engage as an active verb-and students as the ones doing the actions.

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A chart to help students read, write, and think like professionals.

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Disciplinary Literacy Means Doing the Discipline

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Disciplinary Literacy Means Doing the Discipline

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Disciplinary literacy instruction aims to engage students in the authentic activities of the disciplines they study. Instruction focuses on how to use content knowledge and skills to work in a specific discipline and act in the world, rather than simply to know or remember information. Given that texts in various disciplines are designed to serve different purposes and audiences, disciplinary literacy instruction is infused with opportunities to develop multiple literacies. It offers not only ambitious instruction in disciplinary content, but also robust literacy instruction.

So, what does disciplinary literacy instruction look like? And how will we know it when we see it?

Disciplinary Versus Traditional Instruction

The legacy of content-area reading instruction often focuses on textbook reading strategies or ways to infuse more reading and writing into content-area instruction. This can make it difficult to imagine a version of literacy instruction in disciplinary settings that is fully in service of content learning. In this version, teachers don't stop the disciplinary instruction to teach reading instead. And they don't teach students how to read textbooks. Rather, students learn to use texts that are integral to the activities of each discipline or each community of people who use that content for a purpose beyond school.

This positions students as competent, active participants rather than passive novices, and it increases student engagement and independence with content learning. It's the difference between reading a scene from a Shakespearean play for homework and considering that scene from the perspective of a set designer who uses visual cues from existing productions of the play, as well as scenery sketching and construction, to create a specific set. It's the difference between reading a chapter from an auto mechanics textbook to prep for a multiple-choice quiz and interacting with a real or model engine, drawing and labeling its parts, and discussing annotated diagrams of the processes that mechanics use to build, repair, and troubleshoot its functions.

Questions to Ask as You Take a Disciplinary Literacy Approach

Disciplinary literacy instruction engages students in content learning using multiple and often overlapping literacies. The following questions can serve as a guide to implementing the approach.

1. What's the purpose of the text, and who's the audience?

Not every text is meant to be read top to bottom, left to right, word for word. Not every set of paragraphs calls for identifying main ideas and details or main characters and plot elements. In fact, the specific purpose for reading and writing should inform the processes for reading and writing. Knowing something about the purpose and audience of a text should provide insight into how it should be read (used) or written (produced).

For example, the text of the U.S. Constitution is complex and challenging if one tries to read it word by word all the way through. No one who consults the Constitution in important ways would read it like this. Attorneys and judges would concentrate on one amendment at a time as cases are brought before them and built based on the violation of specific rights in particular circumstances, not on the violation of all rights at once. Historians might read one section of the Constitution at a time alongside multiple texts representing relevant issues from the time period during which that section was written or added to the original document. No one is reciting the U.S. Constitution in front of a group or copying notes on it from the board unless they're learning about it for the first time in school.

To be clear: there's nothing wrong with memorization or note-taking. But there is something wrong with instruction that never goes beyond those approaches. Although it can be daunting to engage with texts beyond those that teachers typically address in school, considering how professionals use these texts can simplify the process and make the texts more accessible to student readers and writers. Specialized texts are often written to be used in ways that differ from generic reading habits, which assume that we read every word from left to right from the top of the page to the bottom. Insiders to the communities that use specialized texts frequently have habits that enable them to process these texts more efficiently-prioritizing certain sections, honing in on the parts they need, or reading the texts in an order that helps focus the information.

2. What texts are included in the lesson?

Notice that the word texts here is plural. Just as we might have multiple tabs open on an internet browser or a smartphone to accomplish a single task, we generally consult multiple texts when we have a specific purpose in mind. Choosing a book to read might mean listening to a podcast with the author and reading reviews, the book jacket, and the first page. Similarly, choosing a restaurant might mean browsing the online menu, mapping how far the restaurant is from your house, and texting with others who plan to attend. Running an assay in a lab that is investigating the effect of a new drug might mean reading measurement data, related scientific papers, lab procedure documents, and daily project team communications. Pretty much everything people do in real life is interdisciplinary.

For this reason, few tasks worth student engagement focus on a single text in isolation. Students working on an egg drop experiment in science class might have the directions; their lab notebooks; data and labeled designs from past attempts; and information about gravity, force, drag, and other related concepts from their textbook or a related website or video. Students might use this text set all in the same day, but compliment it with related texts from other days, including other representations of the experiment's content, and news articles or videos about other applications of the content beyond the egg drop experiment. Those other applications might include the design and testing of parachutes and helmets or the way we can learn about design principles from examples found in nature, like the seed dispersal mechanism in helicopter seeds. ( Northeastern University Center for STEM Education's website has ideas on how to create context for an egg drop activity.) Understanding that an egg drop is not just a time-honored school-based activity, but also an encapsulation of physics and engineering principles offers more avenues for engagement in the class and the extension of learning.

3. What are students using the text to do?

Outside of school, no one reads or writes for no reason. If we initiate a literacy activity, we always have a purpose and an audience in mind. So what are students doing with these texts? Are they copying notes from a smartboard for the next graded notebook check? Or are they referring to their notes so they can use specific terms to describe and categorize images of various artifacts shown in social studies class, terms like fossil, petrified, classification, and sediment? The first task might lead to being a good student; the second approximates the practices of people who study the social world for purposes and audiences of their own.

This is not about whether students are always using texts the way professionals do; rather, it's about whether their interaction with a text is likely to lead them toward opportunities to participate in the communities that use this content to accomplish things in the world. Will the literacy work included in the lesson (such as class notes and formative assessments) likely lead to discipline-specific literacy work in the next lesson, such as reading, writing or discussing a discipline-specific text that is (or could be) used outside of school and that features vocabulary or concepts supported by the class notes? Will the notes that students took today provide directions for how to observe or interact during a lab experience tomorrow? Will the scene reading today support a staged run-through of the play that students will perform at the end of the week?

Introducing Students to Both the Community and the Content

To begin integrating real-world work about the topic into instruction, teachers need to know which disciplinary communities are connected to the content standards and topics under discussion. Then they have to consider what texts students are using and how. The questions that follow will help explore these aspects of disciplinary literacy instruction.

4. Not what, but who is the discipline?

Identifying the discipline of a lesson can be difficult if we think of the traditional academic disciplines. For example, are world language classes doing the work of linguistics, cultural comparison, sociology, or geography? Is physics in the service of pure mathematics; biomedical, civil, or environmental engineering; or space sciences? Even if you could answer such questions for a given class on a given day, knowing the disciplinary category doesn't tell us much about instruction. A better question is, Who makes up the discipline? Which disciplinary community uses this text to accomplish their work? For example, the people who read about the parts a French horn might play in a marching band are usually French horn players or band leaders, each with their own purpose and process for engaging with such a text.

So, consider who might engage with the texts that surround a lesson, whether it involves the parts of a cell, a map of the world, or Act I, scene ii of Macbeth. Who uses the formula for slope? Who uses news clippings from another century? What are their goals? How can the tasks we set for students be better approximations of the habits and activities used by those communities that generate and work with this content?

5. What is the disciplinary community using the text to do?

Disciplinary literacy instruction is concerned with active engagement in traditional as well as multidisciplinary fields (such as a course on wellness for high school freshmen or an improvisational theater class elective). For instance, if students are learning about the parts of a cell, to support them in actively engaging with their learning, the teacher might discuss with students questions like, "Who uses this information outside of a middle or high school classroom? What texts do you think they produce or read to do work related to the parts of a cell?" Teachers might share some of these texts (for example, diagrams from articles, video simulations, or articles about breakthroughs and challenges in cancer cell biology) with their students to introduce the content.

If the text is named or suggested in the related subject-area standards, educators can ask themselves these questions:

The first question exposes students to various audiences and text formats. The second positions students as users of texts and doers of the discipline. It ensures that reading is for a purpose, that writing is for an audience, and that both tasks are completed as part of a community of people engaged in the same endeavor. The final question looks at how professionals actually use a text. A scientist might focus on the diagrams included in a protocol; a painter might not read the entire label of a container of paint, but might check the label for a specific ingredient that could interact with the ways they prepared the canvas. A music teacher might teach students to begin looking at a piece by considering the composer, tempo, key signature, and time signature to better prepare themselves for the key and rhythm and make good inferences about possible interpretations while sight reading. Starting with and using these features sets students up for success that playing straight through the piece cannot.

Knowing how to read and write in discipline-specific ways means knowing where to begin, what to prioritize, and how to navigate or construct the format of the texts that surround each activity.

In some cases, student work in a discipline will take them away from traditional print texts toward multimodal or other forms of notation (mathematical or musical) or representation (diagrams, images, and visual fields). Any representation of ideas counts as a text and shares both the cognitive and metacognitive work of decoding/encoding and interpreting and communicating, whether it's linguistic or not.

What Teachers Can Do

It's About Integration

The work of the disciplines is finding, sharing, and constructing meaning, which is also the work of literacy. Reintegrating the study of content with the reading, writing, and talking that accompany its use creates a robust context for both literacy and content learning. Emphasizing how people use and practice a given content and a given set of skills helps students learn the language of a discipline, as well as ways of communicating and the habits of mind that are useful for that endeavor. Learning these things in context builds engagement and motivation, which, in turn, supports cognitive, linguistic, and academic success.

Finally, it's important for teachers to explicitly teach these ways of reading and writing so students have full access to participating at whatever level or to whatever degree they're able. Rather than merely surround students with texts or text-creation opportunities, teachers must demonstrate what students should do with these texts and how people use them in specific contexts. This is particularly important with texts that appear across multiple contexts but that can serve different purposes in each. For example, in an ongoing study of the text types found across content areas in high school courses, news articles have surfaced in nearly every content area and grade. However, the purpose of the news article-and therefore the process for reading it-differs in each course. In social studies, the article might be central to understanding a current event, whereas in math it might provide a problem scenario or a source of data to manipulate. Educators need to consider what students might need to know about how to use the text. This is particularly important in areas where texts become dense and complex.

Whether educators are building or refining their disciplinary literacy instruction, their aim is to prepare students for full participation in tasks and activities that carry meaning and purpose. As such, disciplinary literacy instruction is not about learning content or literacy. It's not even about learning content and literacy, as if the two were separable. It's about learning the literacies that support particular content so students can use that content to do things in the world. Instead of isolating content from text or text from content, disciplinary literacy instruction integrates them both as students read, write, talk, and do the authentic work of the discipline.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ Describe some successful strategies you've tried for merging literacy and content learning.

➛ Does the work you typically assign position students as "doers of the discipline"?

➛ How feasible is it for you to teach with an interdisciplinary approach?

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Disciplinary Literacy Means Doing the Discipline

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Teaching the literacies of specific disciplines means positioning students as competent, active participants as opposed to passive novices.

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Engaging Learners Through Productive Struggle

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Engaging Learners Through Productive Struggle

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Engaging Learners Through Productive Struggle

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We struggle to improve, to learn a new skill, and with difficult interactions—so many struggles. But what we may not acknowledge is that struggle is a good thing

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Reading and Writing Connections in the Literacy Studio with Ellin Keene and Dan Feigelson

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Reading and Writing Connections in the Literacy Studio with Ellin Keene and Dan Feigelson

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Podcast for productive struggle, relevancy and agency, and discourse.

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How might we integrate whole class lessons, small group work, and individual conferences to support students' growth as readers and writers? Listen in as literacy leaders, Ellin O. Keene and Dan Feigelson, join the Phenomenal Teaching Podcast to discuss ways to enhance student engagement and agency by integrating reading and writing. When teachers make these connections apparent, students comprehend more deeply, write more meaningfully, and develop individual identities as readers and writers in the world. This episode connects to the Planning, Workshop and Assessment strands of the PEBC Teaching Framework.

On June 14-15, 2023, PEBC is proud to host Ellin and Dan for our summer institute, "Reading & Writing Connections in the Literacy Workshop." They will offer classroom-ready strategies teachers can use tomorrow and throughout the year, and share videos of integrated classrooms that highlight key practices from their new books; Radical Listening: Reading and Writing Conferences to Reach All Students by Dan Feigelson and The Literacy Studio: Redesigning the Workshop by Ellin O. Keene.

Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and writing. For sixteen years she directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition. She served as Deputy Director and Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the University of Pennsylvania for four years. Ellin works with schools and districts throughout the country and abroad supporting schools and districts with long-term, school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy learning. Ellin recently published The Literacy Studio: Redesigning the Workshop for Readers and Writers which i focused on an up-to-date conceptualization of Readers/Writers' workshop.

Dan Feigelson has worked extensively in New York City schools as a teacher, staff developer, curriculum writer, principal, and local superintendent. An early member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, he has led institutes, workshops and lab-sites around the world on the teaching of reading and writing and is a regular presenter at national conferences. His latest book Radical Listening: Reading and Writing Conferences to Reach All Students , refocuses reading and writing conferences to help all students reach their full potential. His practical approach centers on active listening―an equitable way to listen to, learn from, and guide students. He lives in Harlem and Columbia County, New York.

The " Phenomenal Teaching Podcast " is brought to you by Public Education & Business Coalition (PEBC) and is intended to elevate the strands of the PEBC Teaching Framework illustrated in Wendy Ward Hoffer's book, Phenomenal Teaching . Those strands include community, planning, workshop, thinking strategies, discourse, and assessment. Thank you for joining us this season as we strive to share the stories of educators who are creating scaffolds for each and every student to ensure that classrooms and schools are places where agency, equity, and understanding can flourish.

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Reading & Writing Connections in the Literacy Studio with Ellin O. Keene & Dan Feigelson - PEBC

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Listen in as literacy leaders, Ellin O. Keene and Dan Feigelson, join the Phenomenal Teaching Podcast to discuss ways to enhance student engagement and agency by integrating reading and writing.

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8 Habits of Math Teachers Who Value Productive Struggle

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8 Habits of Math Teachers Who Value Productive Struggle

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Creating Equitable Access and Outcomes for All Secondary Social Scientists

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Creating Equitable Access and Outcomes for All Secondary Social Scientists

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Teacher Feature: Creating Equitable Access & Outcomes for All Secondary Social Scientists - PEBC

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Teacher Feature: Creating Equitable Access & Outcomes for All Secondary Social Scientists with Ryan McKillop

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Cultivating Spaces That Promote Equity, Agency and Connection with Nicole Tucker-Smith

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Cultivating Spaces That Promote Equity, Agency and Connection with Nicole Tucker-Smith