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Credit Angie Wang

This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here.

When I picked up my son from preschool on a recent summer afternoon, his dirty fingers were stained pink from the raspberries he and his classmates had been hungrily foraging earlier that day. He recounted, nonchalantly, how they'd wandered to the creek that morning and observed how the water had risen higher and ran faster than it had earlier in the year because of recent torrential downpours. It was a hot day, so they took off their shoes and dipped their toes in. He described the refreshing sensation of the brisk water on his feet.

This isn't what is considered a typical preschool in the United States, at least not by today's standards. It's the Ann Arbor Forest School, where the majority of my son's school day - five hours a day, four days a week; come rain, shine, snow or subfreezing Michigan temperatures - takes place across 260 acres of forest, wetlands, fields, parks and gardens.

Though still somewhat fringe, nature-based preschools have seen a tidal wave of interest in recent years. According to The Natural Start Alliance, an organization devoted to promoting early childhood environmental education, the number of these types of programs in the United States - which tend to focus on loosely structured outdoor play rather than strict academic curriculum - has jumped from 20 in 2008 to more than 250 in 2017. Nearly every state seems to have one, though they tend to congregate near the country's perimeters: in the Pacific Northwest and California, the upper Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and New England.

But can they offer more for today's young learners than traditional preschools can? The answer depends largely on how you measure success - and whom you ask. Experts have been debating the merits of play-based versus academic preschool education for much of the last century. And while Mark Sackville-Ford, Ph.D., a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, said that there's an intuitive sense (and lots of anecdotal data) that nature-based preschools are worthwhile, further research is necessary to understand the mechanisms at play.

Still, all the key elements of forest school - such as risky play, time in nature, experiential learning and physical activity outdoors - have well documented benefits and research.

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At the Foxtail Forskola forest school at Earthstar Farms in Whitefish, Montana, children ages 3 to 6 spend nearly all of the school day outdoors learning social and emotional readiness through free play and nature-based activities on a 35-acre organic farm. Credit Casey Kreider/The Daily Inter Lake, via Associated Press

A ripe environment for change

Patti Bailie, Ph.D., an assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Maine Farmington, said that nature-based preschools may have risen, at least in part, from a backlash against fluctuating academic and environmental landscapes for young children.

As today's teachers and students feel pressured by the idea that the path to a "good" college and professional earning potential begins as early as preschool, direct academic instruction is now prioritized over play, music and art. And as the modern 5-year-old is now required to sit still during instruction and to read and memorize vocabulary, kindergarten has become the new first grade, and preschool has become kindergarten-prep.

At the same time, outdoor time for children is dwindling.

In a study published in 2012, for instance, researchers from the University of Washington surveyed nearly 9,000 preschool-aged children across the country and found that just about half went outside to play at least once a day with a parent. In another survey of 830 American mothers published in 2004, the majority (85 percent) said that their children played outside less than they did even a few years prior; and 70 percent said that while they played outside daily when they were kids, only 31 percent of their own children did so.

Some experts have called this downward trend in outdoor time "nature deficit disorder," a term coined by Richard Louv, a journalist and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Children and Nature Network, in his seminal 2005 book " Last Child in the Woods." American pediatricians have even gone so far as to start prescribing outdoor time to children to combat a range of issues, including obesity and depression.

A school without a roof

Can nature-based preschools be a possible antidote to these woes? Originating in Scandinavia in the early 1950s, the first nature-based preschool to open in the United States was the New Canaan Nature Center in Connecticut in 1967.

Most such schools admit children between ages 3 and 6, and prioritize time spent learning and playing in nature rather than doing structured, pre-determined activities in a classroom. Picking up twigs helps develop their pincer grasp, said Tara Habeck, founder of the Ann Arbor Forest School (and, full disclosure, my son's teacher). Drawing in dirt also bolsters pre-writing skills, Habeck continued, and observing the configurations of pine cones, leaves and flowers helps them learn about patterns. Rolling down hills offers firsthand physics lessons.

But just how much time is spent rolling down hills varies greatly by program. Most places that call themselves "nature-based preschools" might spend half the day outside and the remaining time in a classroom; whereas programs billing themselves as "forest schools," "forest kindergartens" or "outdoor preschools" will most likely spend three-quarters - if not all - of their day outdoors, in all types of weather.

Unlike children in brick-and-mortar schools, forest school kids are largely left to their own devices with unstructured (but still monitored) free play - to investigate an ant hill, jump in mud or play imagination games. Risky play is also encouraged, whether it's climbing a tall tree or using a knife to whittle.

Perhaps most alarming to achievement-minded parents is the fact that there is often no direct instruction, at least not in the way one might imagine in a school. According to Dr. Sackville-Ford, the whims of a student's interests - as well as the season and the weather - might dictate how they spend their day.

Kids in traditional preschools, on the other hand, typically spend more time inside and are less likely to venture out in inclement weather. In one study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2015, for instance, researchers from Seattle observed 98 children across 10 preschools in the area for four days at each school. They found that most of the children's activity (73 percent) was sedentary and just 8 percent of their day was spent on outdoor free play.

Whereas a traditional preschool might have 11 to 25 students with two teachers, class sizes in nature-based preschools tend to be smaller, with six students for every teacher.

Weighing the pros and cons

While there's no doubt that childhood access to green space is associated with certain benefits - including improved mental health, decreased chance of nearsightedness, and reduced symptoms of ADHD and hyperactivity - nature-based preschools provide more than mere access to the outdoors.

Though it may sound terrifying to today's helicopter parent, children who engage in risk-taking tend to reap many benefits, including improved motor function, risk assessment, problem solving and resilience.

Outdoor programs also give youngsters lessons in how to be ecologically conscious stewards of the environment, said Dr. Bailie, such as compassion toward plants and animals, the importance of picking up litter and how to garden.

Spending meaningful time outdoors can also strengthen a child's foundation for literacy even before she's taught how to spell a single word, said Bailie. Listening to and identifying bird and other nature sounds, for instance, can prepare her to recognize basic word sounds.

There is one - albeit small and limited - longitudinal study of a forest school program that observed 11 disadvantaged British youth who participated in a weekly forest school program for three years. The researchers, who published their findings in 2018, reported that compared with when they started the program, the kids showed improved reading, writing and math scores; increased school attendance; and enhanced self-regulation and resilience.

Of course, no educational model is without its weaknesses. Nature-based preschools (as with most preschools in America) are almost always private, and have been criticized for catering mostly to white middle-class families. They also tend to be pricey: according to The Brookings Institution, the average cost of full time center-based day care and preschool for children under 5 runs $5.31 an hour. My son's forest school, by contrast, breaks down to $11 an hour. Gear like thermal underwear, proper footwear and full body rain suits can get expensive, too, though some programs offer loaner or rental items, and secondhand purchases are encouraged.

There are free nature education programs across the country, such as those offered by Free Forest School, a nonprofit organization, but they typically meet once a week and require a caregiver to be present, so it's not always accessible to working parents. In general, many outdoor preschools do not operate full time (my son's runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and can end up working better as a complement to home schooling rather than as a viable option for working parents.

Access to nature can also be tricky in urban areas, though even the most densely packed cities typically have some green space that would fit the bill. A common misconception is that forest schools must take place in a forest, but evergreens, foxes and pine cones are not requirements. In New York, for example, there's a nature-based preschool at a garden on the Lower East Side and another in Prospect Park, among others. Some programs even take place in the desert.

Additionally, licensing is challenging for providers as authorities are still trying to figure out how to classify and regulate schools without walls. As a result, many programs are connected with existing schools or nature centers, or are licensed as in-home day cares. ( Oregon and Washington are the only states currently with pilot programs to license outdoor programs.)

Even the rising popularity brings its own issues. As terms like "nature-based" and "forest school" become buzzwords, experts like Dr. Sackville-Ford are concerned that more places will start adopting those labels without also embracing the full spectrum of practices and underpinnings that go with it.

If you're interested in sending your toddler to an outdoor school, Louv, whose most recent book is " Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life," recommended seeking preschools that provide hands-on experiences tromping in mud, climbing trees, and learning directly in an outdoor (preferably biodiverse) nature setting. But even if your child's school doesn't offer this level of immersion, most experts agree that even a little time spent in nature is better than none.

Anecdotally, I've certainly noticed the gains firsthand in my son, who has flourished outdoors after struggling - and bouncing off the walls - at previous preschools. Now, he's active and bright with improved problem-solving and emotional-regulation skills. Most important, he's excited to go to school every day. But I also know that nature-based schools are not for everyone. It certainly takes a level of commitment to layer up a 4-year-old for a day spent traipsing through the forest in the middle of Michigan's harsh winter. But for us, it's been nothing short of transformative.
[For more on early childhood education, read about the Waldorf method, the costly burden of child care, and the increasing academic demands on young students.]
Katherine Martinelli is a freelance writer whose work has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and others. A native New Yorker, she now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., with her family.

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Can Climbing Trees Replace Preparing for Tests?

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This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here. When I picked up my son from preschool on a recent summer afternoon, his dirty fingers were stained pink from the raspberries he and his classmates had been hungrily foraging earlier that day.

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Credit Angie Wang

This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here.

World War II was over and Italy was reeling. The government disbursed funds to towns in order to help rebuild their communities. And in the area surrounding the city of Reggio Emilia, citizens decided to invest in early childhood education: They built a school using the stone and timber from buildings destroyed during the war. A local educator, Loris Malaguzzi, would be the key figure in what the school, and the network of municipal infant centers and preschools that followed, became.

His approach springs from the notion that young children are capable of initiating their own learning, a philosophy that came to share the name of the region. The Reggio Emilia approach spread internationally, in part thanks to a 1991 Newsweek article heralding the schools, and today there are 1,200 individual members - educators and advocates - of the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance. Only schools in Italy are true Reggio schools. In the United States, the preschools, most of them private, that use the approach call themselves Reggio-inspired, and while many schools have sent representatives to Italy to study the system, there is no formal certification process for schools or teachers. Schools in the United States typically cover the traditional preschool years (3 to 4 years old, and often younger), and children leave when they go to kindergarten. While there is no strict checklist of attributes, there are some shared elements you can expect to find in a Reggio-inspired school.

Children can guide their own learning.

"Children aren't empty vessels who need to be filled," said Gabriela Garcia, executive director of the Reggio-inspired Grant Park Cooperative Preschool in Atlanta. Instead, the Reggio philosophy is that "children are competent, confident and capable beings from birth," she said. But that doesn't mean that preschoolers are in charge or that the schedule is a free-for-all. Instead, children follow their own interests within a framework of activities directed by the teachers. "The ball is being passed back and forth," said Jane Racoosin, director of the Reggio-inspired Beginnings Nursery School in Manhattan.

Often, those explorations will occur when an educator sets up an experience for a small group of children and their reactions lead to a specific topic or theme. That topic can become a curricular thread that is followed for weeks or months. Sarah Wheeler, a Manhattan mother of two current Beginnings students and one graduate, said that even when her children passed through the same classrooms, with the same teachers, the curriculums were different. One child's class explored sound and music-making, including building their own instruments, as well as planning and building their own multi-tiered garage as a group. When another child was in the same class, they focused on textures, including creating them, measuring them and identifying them in and out of school. That led to learning about Braille and the five senses. Ashley Marotta, in Boulder, Colo., is the parent of three children, one of whom graduated from a Reggio-inspired school and one who will enter her final year at the Reggio-inspired Boulder Journey School this fall. Her youngest child was in a class that focused on the local library after they walked there to visit. When the community was invited to give feedback on a proposal for a new library, some of the kids attended a meeting, advocating for space for babies and room for wheelchairs.

In that way, the curriculum emerges organically as opposed to top-down, in partnership with the children, and within the context of the community. So instructors at Reggio-inspired schools are flexible and don't start the year with a preconceived notion of what will be taught or when.

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A classroom where The Reggio Emilia approach to teaching is used. Great attention is given to the look and feel of the classroom. The use of light is a strong component in the curriculum. Students make paintings on translucent material and hang them on the windows for light to shine through. Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times

The classroom environment plays a key role.

One thing you'll hear from pretty much anyone involved with the Reggio-Emilia approach is that, after parents and teachers, "the environment is the third teacher." Classroom layouts are carefully planned to encourage interaction between those in the classroom and with the outdoors, and to be open-ended, offering many options for exploration. "Everything in the schools should be facilitating encounters between children or between children and teachers," said Lella Gandini, the United States Reggio liaison, who helps to bring the approach to schools here.

Reggio holds that children and teachers shouldn't be limited to materials marketed for early childhood education, said Alison Maher, executive director of the Boulder Journey School. They choose between fine art materials such as clay, tools, reclaimed materials, natural materials like plants or modern tech, depending on the context and community, Maher said. (In her school, when children worried that fish in two different tanks couldn't communicate with each other, teachers used computers to set up a FaceTime connection between the tanks.) Many schools have a room dedicated to art - in Italy called an "atelier" - often with a specialized arts teacher ("atelierista" in Reggio-speak).

The idea is to provide children with many ways to express themselves. (Malaguzzi wrote a poem called "The Hundred Languages"; and a foundational book about Reggio Emilia, which Gandini co-edited, is called "The Hundred Languages of Children.") Preschoolers approach the materials and think: "'I have an idea in my head. How can I gather the things I need and play it out or make it come to life?'" said Racoosin.

Work is carefully documented.

Teachers keep an ongoing record of students' activities using photos, videos or tape recordings. "It's the glue that holds everything together," said Maher. It's part of the feedback loop of how learning progresses; teachers review those observations and sometimes discuss them with their colleagues to figure out what options might be presented next. Documentation also shows the children that their ideas are important, said Racoosin. (Beginnings, the school in Manhattan, moved its bulletin boards displaying student work lower on the walls so they'd be at eye-level for preschoolers.) Giovanna and Noah Speights have sent two kids to Grant Park Cooperative Preschool in Atlanta, which has programs for children as young as 1. The first entry in their children's portfolios was a description, with photos, of a home visit by teachers before school started, and the kids added to their records throughout their time there, bringing them back and forth between home and school. When her son graduated, "he had four years of documentation - quotes, art and photos of the classroom," said Giovanna.

Academic skills won't follow a strict curriculum.

A representative for the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance said that there are no tuition statistics for Reggio-inspired schools over all, since there is no formal certification process for the schools and anyone can adopt all or part of the Reggio approach. Maher, of the Boulder Journey School, said: "Tuition is not connected to the philosophy. It is reflective of our teacher-student ratios, the educational levels of our teachers and the cost of living." She added that scholarships are available, as they are at some other Reggio-inspired schools.

The Reggio approach isn't for parents who want a very structured approach, or who want to know in a concrete way what's going to be taught during the school year, said Robin Aronow, founder of School Search NYC, which advises parents on public- and private-school options. That said, some Reggio-inspired schools often incorporate other educational influences beyond the Italian system, which may include a more structured approach. For example, Reggio-inspired schools in New York City, where parents tend to have a closer eye on kindergarten admissions, may incorporate the basics, said Aronow.

"Literacy and math learning are all embedded," said Racoosin. "Will a child learn a letter of the week? No. Will they learn about literacy? Oh yes." Wheeler said her oldest child acquired "all the skills that are expected in kindergarten," including the ability to write her name and exposure to literacy and numeracy. But she also left with other crucial skills, she said, including the ability to work independently and in groups, and to stick with things when they got challenging. "The projects fostered an inventiveness and a perseverance that I am so reassured she has," she said.

"The Italians have said to us: Once children develop certain skills and concepts such as empathy or critical thinking, that's something that no one can take away," Garcia said.
[For more on early childhood education, read about the Waldorf method, forest schools, and the costly burden of child care.]
Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer and a mom.

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This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here. World War II was over and Italy was reeling. The government disbursed funds to towns in order to help rebuild their communities.

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Credit Angie Wang

This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here.

The first time I walked into a Montessori preschool classroom six years ago, I thought to myself, what is this sorcery? The materials were beautiful but unfamiliar; the room seemed eerily calm considering it held so many 3-year-olds; and the terms the teachers used were new and confusing to me. They're not lessons or activities, they're "work"; and what, pray tell, was that pink tower thing everyone kept talking about?

Now that both of my kids have gone through Montessori preschools, I have a much better understanding of how they work. That's not to say the philosophy is easy to wrap one's head around - and, of course, every school is different. But if you're considering Montessori preschools for your child, or you just want to learn more about them, here are some basics about the history of the philosophy, how well kids learn in Montessori preschools, and what parents should look for - and avoid - if they're going the Montessori route.

Montessori's roots

The schools are named after Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870, who was fascinated by children and closely observed them. After years of doing so, she developed a theory of human development based on the idea that children instinctively know what they need to learn, and that, when they are surrounded by the right hands-on materials, they can educate themselves independently. "She took this notion that deep inside, we know what we need for our development," explained Angeline Lillard, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies Montessori education. Another Montessorian idea is that kids learn by practicing the kinds of "real" activities they see adults doing. For example, in her Montessori classroom my daughter particularly loved pouring water from a teapot into cups.

In 1907, Dr. Montessori opened a school based on these theories in the working-class Rome neighborhood of San Lorenzo, for children aged 3 to 6. In it, children learned at their own pace, following their own interests, using materials that Dr. Montessori had specially prepared for her classrooms. She allowed the children to have long, uninterrupted work cycles in which they could spend as much time as they wanted on a particular activity - what she called "work" - and then move on to a new choice when they had finished.

Dr. Montessori's school was extremely successful, so she started more, and soon Montessori schools began appearing in other parts of Europe as well as the United States.

The Montessori classroom

Montessori preschool classrooms usually look quite different from "traditional" preschool classrooms. For one thing, kids ages 3 to 6 all work in the same room, so the younger ones can learn from their elders and the older children can develop a sense of leadership and authority. (When children go through Montessori preschools, they stay with the same teacher over the three years.)

The classrooms also use specifically designed Montessori materials, so you probably won't see Lego bricks and dress-up corners. (More on that later.) And although children might do certain activities as a large group, they tend to work alone or in very small groups. "Montessori is all about the child - meeting the child where his or her needs are, and having an environment prepared for the child so they can be successful independently and have that opportunity to concentrate on what they need to," said Hilary Green, director of the Institute for Advanced Montessori Studies in Silver Spring, Md.

How well Montessori kids learn

Research on preschool education can be hard to conduct and interpret, because kids who go to different preschools may differ in various ways, such as by socioeconomic status, which itself affects academic achievement. To get around these differences, in a 2017 study, Dr. Lillard and her colleagues compared educational outcomes among 141 preschoolers who had been randomly chosen via lottery to attend either a Montessori preschool or a traditional preschool. The two groups weren't academically any different when they started school, but by the end of the three-year study, the kids who had gone through Montessori preschools were more academically advanced and had better social skills than those who went to a traditional school. The Montessori students also reported enjoying school more.

What about kids with special needs, sensory processing issues or conditions such as attention deficit disorder? Some parents have told me they felt Montessori wasn't a good fit for their kids with learning or behavioral differences. But Dr. Lillard said that Montessori preschools can work well for such students. "Montessori, when it's done right, adjusts to every child as an individual," she said. "Every child can learn in their own pace, in their own way." But it's crucial to have responsive teachers, Dr. Lillard said, who can help these children understand their needs. Some especially energetic kids, for instance, might need to take regular breaks, and good teachers can help students recognize when they need them and what kind of breaks help them the most.

Montessori variations

It's important to keep in mind that schools can call themselves "Montessori" even if they aren't. "Anybody can have a picture of a pink tower and call itself Montessori and there's no recourse for that," said Paige Bray, Ed.D., director of the Center for Montessori Studies at the University of Hartford. (The pink tower, if you are wondering, is a sensory-based Montessori work that involves stacking pink cubes of different sizes.)

Some schools might use Montessori materials and approaches but supplement them with more traditionally American materials or classes; my kids' preschool, for instance, incorporated music, art and Spanish classes. Montessori scholars disagree about just how strictly today's preschools should adhere to Dr. Montessori's original principles. The American Montessori Society, a non-profit organization based in New York City, embraces a more modern, supplemented approach. "Things have changed, and there are some new modern things out there that we have access to that weren't available when she was doing this work," said Green, who serves on the society's board of directors. On the other hand, the Association Montessori Internationale, which was founded by Dr. Montessori and is now based in Amsterdam, believes that the schools should adhere closely to her original ideas, in part because they align with unchanging principles of child development.

Some research suggests that the more classic, A.M.I.-aligned Montessori schools are the most academically effective. In a 2012 study, Dr. Lillard compared academic outcomes among kids who went to classic Montessori preschools, supplemented Montessori preschools and more traditional high-quality preschools. (The schools weren't determined by lottery, but Dr. Lillard tried to match students according to socioeconomic status and other factors.) Those in the classic Montessori preschools, she found, made the biggest gains in math, reading, vocabulary and social problem-solving over the course of the school year. Those in the supplemented and traditional preschools fared about the same as one another.

Montessori tuition varies significantly from school to school, depending on location and whether the program is traditional or supplemented (which can require more teachers, and often a higher cost). The Montessori School of Peoria in Illinois, for example, is $6,970 per year for a full-day program, whereas the Kingsley Montessori School in Boston is $30,400. The school day can also vary, but typically starts at 8 or 9 a.m., and goes to noon, for a half day, or 3 p.m., for a full day.

What to look for - and avoid

How do you know if the preschool you're considering for your child is truly a Montessori school? And how can you discern between classic and supplemented curricula? One of the key trademarks of the Montessori method is the mixed-age classroom, so no matter what, if it's Montessori, you should see kids aged 3 to 6 grouped together. Montessori schools should also have a three-hour block in the morning in which students work uninterrupted with Montessori materials. (If the school you're looking at adheres to these tenets but also lets kids use toys, Lego bricks or other non-Montessori materials, then it may be a supplemented Montessori school.) It's also important, Green says, for Montessori teachers to have credentials from a program that has been accredited by the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education.

Ultimately, whether it's classic or supplemented Montessori, or not Montessori at all, the best preschool for your child is one that feels good and right. Do the students seem happy and relaxed? Does the classroom atmosphere feel positive and conducive to learning, and do the teachers seem warm and responsive? Parenting so often requires trusting your gut - and finding the right preschool for your kid should tap into those instincts, too.
[For more on early childhood education, read about the Waldorf method,forest schools, and the Reggio Emilia method.]
Melinda Wenner Moyer is a mom of two and a science journalist who writes for Slate, Mother Jones, Scientific American and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications.

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What to Know About Montessori Preschools

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This piece is part of NYT Parenting's guide to early education. Find more stories about starting preschool here. The first time I walked into a Montessori preschool classroom six years ago, I thought to myself, what is this sorcery?

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Check out @hawkenlowerschool Instagram page for daily updates from Hawken Lower School

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An article from Education Week about differentating instruction from multiple perspectives. Check out three videos sharing the idea of differentiating with content, process and product. Also, ideas for differentiating for ELL students and a number of differentiation strategies.

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Instructional expert and esteemed blogger Larry Ferlazzo wants you to know: Differentiation isn't as hard as you might think.

In an animated video published by Education Week this fall, he explained that differentiating instruction is really about getting to know your students and being flexible with the ways they demonstrate their learning. It is not, in fact, about spending your evenings planning a separate lesson for each student.

Today, we're publishing two more videos about differentiation featuring Ferlazzo and veteran teacher Katie Hull Sypnieski. (They recently co-authored a book called The ELL Teacher's Toolbox.)

In the video below, Ferlazzo and Hull Sypnieski describe techniques they use to differentiate lessons for English-language learners. Those include strategies like pairing up students of different language levels and playing classroom videos at slower speeds.

And in the other video, below, the teachers talk through the kinds of questions they ask themselves when planning a lesson for a multi-ability classroom. What will students do if they finish early? How can the materials be modified to make them useful for all types of learners?

The goal with differentiation is to make any single lesson accessible to all students. "Not everybody will get the same exact text or use the same strategy," Hull Sypnieski explains in the ELL video, "but it's fair because you're meeting every student where they are."

For more information (and tips) on differentation, see Differentiated Instruction: A Primer and this collection of blog posts from Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo.

You may also want to check out this widely read 2015 opinion piece by educational consultant James R. Delisle about why "Differentiation Doesn't Work" and the response from education professor Carol Ann Tomlinson.

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How to Differentiate Instruction (Without Losing Your Mind)

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Instructional expert and esteemed blogger Larry Ferlazzo wants you to know: Differentiation isn't as hard as you might think. In an animated video published by Education Week this fall, he explained that differentiating instruction is really about getting to know your students and being flexible with the ways they demonstrate their learning.

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The benefits of social media and how we can help our kids gain and keep strong social skills.

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A website sharing witty 'Would you Rather' math problems.

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Would You Rather Math - ASKING STUDENTS TO CHOOSE A PATH AND JUSTIFY IT WITH MATH

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Teachers, sign up for my mini-workshop to learn about how to implement Would You Rather Math into your classroom routines. We will explore some sentence frames, what happens when things don't go as planned, how to use the prompts in a remote learning setting, and much more. See you there!

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Would you Hire your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should be Teaching Them

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Would you Hire your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should be Teaching Them

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An article by Tony Wagner featured on 'The Daily Riff' discussing the most important schools kids will need to enter the world they are growing up in.

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7 Skills Schools Should Be Teaching Them

By Tony Wagner

I've spent the last two years researching and writing a new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need -- and What We Can Do About It. I began with several questions: First, in the new global economy, where any job that can be turned into a routine is being either automated or "off-shored," what skills will our students need to get -- and keep -- a good job. And what skills are needed for citizenship today? Are these education goals in conflict, I wondered.

With a clearer picture of the skills young people will need, I then set out to learn to what extent we are teaching and testing the skills that matter most. And because we already know that many of our nation's urban schools are failing, I chose to observe classrooms in some of our most highly regarded suburban schools in order to understand whether our "best" was, in fact, good enough for our children's future. What I discovered in this journey may come as a surprise to many.

One of my first interviews was with Clay Parker, the President of the Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards -- a company that, among other things, makes the machines and supplies the chemicals for the manufacture of microelectronics devices, including silicon semiconductors and flat panel displays. He's an engineer by training and the head of a very technical business, so when I asked him about the skills he looks for when he hires young people into the company, I was taken aback by his answer.

"First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions," Parker responded. "Our business is changing, and so the skills our engineers need change rapidly, as well. We can teach them the technical stuff. But for employees to solve problems or to learn new things, they have to know what questions to ask. And we can't teach them how to ask good questions - how to think. The ability to ask the right questions is the single most important skill."

"What other skills are you looking for?" I asked, expecting that he'd jump quickly to content expertise.

"I want people who can engage in good discussion --who can look me in the eye and have a give and take."

"I don't understand," I confessed.

"All of our work is done in teams. You have to know how to work well with others. But you also have to know how to engage the customer -- to find out what his needs are. If you can't engage others, then you won't learn what you need to know."

I was initially skeptical of Parker's answers -- thinking perhaps that his views weren't representative of business leaders in general. But after having completed nearly 100 interviews with leaders from Apple to Unilever to the U.S. Army and reviewed the research on the workplace skills most needed, I have come to understand that the world of work has changed profoundly. There are, I discovered, Seven Survival Skills that all of our students will need to master in order to get a good job in the new "flat" world of work. I also came to see how these are the same skills young people need in order to understand and discuss some of the most pressing issues we face as a democracy in the 21st century.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem-solving
In order for companies to compete in the new global economy, they need every worker to be a "knowledge worker" -- and to think about how to continuously improve their products, processes, or services. Over and over again, executives told me that the heart of critical thinking and problem-solving skills is the ability to ask the right questions. As one senior executive from Dell Computer said, "Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems."

Ellen Kumata, who is managing partner at Cambria Associates, consults to senior executives at Fortune 200 companies. She explained to me the extraordinary pressures on all leaders today, regardless of their product or service. "When I talk to my clients, the challenge is this: how do you do things that haven't been done before, where you have to re-think or think anew, or break set in a fundamental way -- it's not incremental improvement anymore. That just won't cut it. The markets are changing too fast, the environments are changing too fast."
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
Teamwork, it seems, is no longer just about working with others in your building. And traditional top-down accountability structures are rapidly being replaced by horizontal networks. My conversation with CEO Christie Pedra at Siemens, first suggested to me that the concept of teamwork today is very different than it was twenty years ago. "Technology has allowed for virtual teams," she explained. "The way some engineering projects in our company are set up is that you are part of a virtual team. We have teams working on major infrastructure projects that are all over the U.S. On other projects, you're working with people all around the world on solving a software problem. They don't work in the same room, they don't come to the same office, but every week they're on a variety of conference calls; they're doing web casts; they're doing net meetings."

Mike Summers, who is Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell Computers, said that his greatest concern was young people's lack of leadership skills. "Kids just out of school have an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and collaborative skills," he explained, "They lack the ability to influence versus direct and command."
3. Agility and Adaptability
Clay Parker explained that anyone who comes to work at BOC Edwards today "has to think, be flexible, change, and be adaptive, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems. We change what we do all the time. I've been here four years, and we've done fundamental re-organization every year because of changes in the business. People have to learn to adapt. I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills."
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Mark Chandler, the Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Cisco was one of the strongest proponents of these traits. "Leadership is the capacity to take initiative and trust yourself to be creative," he told me. "I say to my employees if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try ten things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. If you set stretch goals, you'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying. One of the problems of a large company is risk aversion. Our challenge is how to create an entrepreneurial culture in a larger organization."
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
Mike Summers, who is Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell Computers, spoke forcefully on this issue: "We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it's hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. They are unable to communicate their thoughts effectively. You're talking to an exec, and the first thing you'll get asked if you haven't made it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of your presentation is, 'What do you want me to take away from this meeting?' They don't know how to answer that question."

Listening to Summers' comments as a former high school English teacher myself, I was surprised by the list of skills he thought important: not only being able to communicate one's thoughts clearly and concisely, but also being able to create focus, energy, and passion. Summers and other leaders from various companies were not necessarily complaining about young people's poor grammar, punctuation, or spelling -- the things we spend so much time teaching and testing in our schools. While it's obviously important to write and speak correctly, the complaints I heard most frequently were more about fuzzy thinking and young people not knowing how to write with a real voice.
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
Employees in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information flowing into their work lives on a daily basis. As Mike Summers told me, "There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the information effectively it almost freezes them in their steps."

It's not just the sheer quantity of information that represents such a challenge. It is also how rapidly and constantly the information is changing. Quick, how many planets are there? While I was at Harvard in the early 1990's, I heard then Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine say in a speech that the half-life of knowledge in the humanities is ten years, and in math and science, it's only two or three years. And that was fifteen years ago! I wonder what he would say it is today.
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Clay Parker stressed the importance of employees whom he hires being more than just smart. "I want people who can think -- they're not just bright -- they're also inquisitive. Are they engaged, are they interested in the world?" And Mark Summers told me: "People who've learned to ask great questions and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in our environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have most impact on innovation."

Daniel Pink, the author of "A Whole New Mind", observes that with increasing abundance, people want more unique products and services. Plain vanilla won't cut it any more in today's crowded marketplace: "For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful." Pink notes that developing young people's capacities for imagination, creativity, and empathy will be increasing important for maintaining our country's competitive advantage in the future.

" Even in our best schools, we are teaching kids to memorize much more than to think. And in the 21st century, mere memorization won't get you very far. "

The Global Achievement Gap Revealed

I've spent time leading what I call "learning walks" and observing in classrooms all over the country for more than twenty years. In my new book, I profile a number of secondary honors and Advanced Placement classes in three school systems that enjoy excellent reputations due to their high test scores. Here is a sampling of what I saw:
Advanced Placement Chemistry
Students are in groups of two and three mixing chemicals according to directions that are written on the blackboard. Once the mixtures are prepared, they then heat the concoction with Bunsen burners. According to the directions on the board, they are supposed to record their observations on a worksheet. I watch a group of three young men whose mixture is giving off a thin spiral of smoke as it's being heated -- something that none of the other students' beakers are doing. One student looks back at the blackboard and then at his notes. Then all three stop what they are doing -- apparently waiting for the teacher, who is sitting at her desk, to come help them.

"What's happening to your mixture," I ask the group.

"Donno," one mutters. "We must have mixed it up wrong."

"What's your hypothesis about what happened -- why it's smoking?"

The three look at each other, and then the student who has been doing all the speaking looks at me and shrugs.

"Do you know what a hypothesis is?" I press.

My question is greeted with blank looks. Finally, their spokesperson says, "We had it on a test as a vocab question. Isn't it -- like -- an idea of what's supposed to happen?"
Advanced Placement U.S. Government
The teacher is finishing up reviewing answers to a sample test that the class took the previous day which contains 80 multiple choice questions related to the functions and branches of the federal government.

When he's done, he says "Okay, now let's look at some sample free response questions from previous years' AP exams." He flips the overhead projector on, turns out the lights, and reads from the text of a transparency: Give 3 reasons why the Iron Triangle may be criticized as undemocratic.

"How would you answer this question?" the teacher asks. No one replies. "Ok, who can give me a definition of the Iron Triangle?"

"The military-industrial-congressional complex," a student pipes up.

"Okay, so what would be three reasons why it would be considered undemocratic?" The teacher calls on a student in the front row who has his hand half raised, and he answers the question in a voice that we can't hear over the hum of the projector's fan.

"Good. Now let's look at another one." The teacher flips another transparency onto the projector. "Now this question is about bureaucracy. Let me tell you how to answer this one . . ."

Advanced Placement English

It is the beginning of class, and the teacher explains that they are going to review students' notes on the literature they will use to answer questions on the Advanced Placement exam, which will be given next week. There are seven students in the room, and all of them are deeply slouched in their chairs, which are arranged in a semi-circle around the teacher's desk.

The teacher is seated at her desk, as she asks: "Now what is Woolf saying about the balance between an independent versus a social life?"

Students ruffle through their notebooks. Finally, a young woman, reading from her notes, answers, "Mrs. Ramsey sought meaning from social interactions."

"Yes, that's right. Now what about the artist, Lily? How did she construct meaning?"

"Through her painting," another student mumbles, her face scrunched close to her notes.

"And so what is Woolf saying about the choices these two women have made, and what each has sacrificed?"

No reply. The teacher sighs, gets up, goes to the board and begins writing.

Once in a great while, I observe a class where a teacher is using academic content as a means of developing students' core competencies. When you see such a class, the contrast to the others is stark:
Algebra II
It is the beginning of the period, and the teacher is finishing up writing a problem on the board. He turns to the students, who are sitting in desk-chairs which are arranged in squares of four that face one another. "You haven't seen this kind of problem before," he explains. "And solving it will require you to use concepts from both geometry and algebra. Each group will try to develop at least two different ways of solving this problem. After all the groups have finished, I'll randomly choose someone from each group who will write one of your proofs on one of the boards around the room, and I'll ask that person to explain the process your group used. Are there any questions?"

There are none, and the groups quickly go to work. There is a great deal of animated discussion within all of the groups as they take the problem apart and talk about different ways to solve it. While they work, the teacher circulates from group to group. Occasionally, a student will ask a question, but the teacher never answers it. Instead, he either asks another question in response, such as "have you considered . . .?" or "why did you assume that?" or simply "have you asked someone in your group?"

What are some of the design elements that make this an effective lesson -- a lesson in which students are, in fact, learning a number of the Seven Survival Skills, while also mastering academic content? First, students are given a complex, multi-step problem that is different from the ones they've seen in the past and, to solve it, they have to apply previously acquired knowledge from both geometry and algebra. Mere memorization won't get them very far in this lesson; critical thinking and problem-solving skills are required. Second, they have to find two ways to solve the problem, which requires some initiative and imagination. Just getting the correct answer isn't good enough; they have to explain their proofs -- using effective communication skills. Third, the teacher does not spoon feed students the answers; he uses questions to push students' thinking -- as well as their tolerance for ambiguity. Finally, because the teacher has said that he'll randomly call on a student to show how the group solved the problem, each student in every group is held accountable. The group can't rely on the work of one or two students to get by, and the teacher isn't going to just call on the first student to raise a hand or shout out an answer. Teamwork is required for success.
"Rigor" Redefined
Increasingly in American schools today, there is only one curriculum: test prep. Assessment drives instruction -- for better or for worse. And when most of the tests are multiple choice and require mainly memorization of facts -- it's definitely for the worse. It is the rare teacher -- like the one whom I described above -- who is willing to risk teaching students to think versus merely drilling what must be covered for the test. Of the classes that I've observed, fewer than one in twenty met this criterion, unless you are in one of the exceptional schools I describe later in the book where teaching all students "habits of mind" is the curriculum.

Even in our best schools, we are teaching kids to memorize much more than to think. And in the 21st century, mere memorization won't get you very far. There's too much information, and it's changing and growing exponentially. Besides, most of the information we need is readily available on the nearest computer or PDA screen -- provided we know how to access and analyze it. Where in the 20th century, rigor meant mastering more -- and more complex -- academic content, 21st century rigor is about creating new knowledge and applying what you know to new problems and situations.

All over the country, I see schools that are succeeding at making AYP but failing our students. We are not teaching or testing the skills that our students need for college, careers, or citizenship. These skills have, in fact, converged, but they are rarely the focus of work in classrooms. In order for this change to occur, we must first re-define excellent instruction. Excellent teaching is not a check list of teacher behaviors and a model lesson that covers content standards. It is working with colleagues to ensure mastery by all students of the skills they need to succeed as lifelong learners, workers, and citizens. I have yet to talk to a recent graduate or a college teacher or a community leader who said not knowing enough academic content was a problem. In my interviews, everyone talked about the importance of critical thinking, communication skills, and collaboration.

We need to use academic content as a means of teaching the Seven Survival Skills every day -- in every grade level and every class. The Seven Survival Skills can and must be tested through a combination of locally developed assessments and new nationally-normed, online tests such as the College and Work Readiness Assessment, which measures students' analytic reasoning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and writing skills.

It is time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher standard of rigor -- one that is defined according to 21st century criteria. It is time for our profession to advocate for accountability systems that will enable us to teach and test the skills that matter most. Our students' futures -- and the future of our country -- are at stake.

"Tony Wagner has worked for more than thirty-five years in the field of school improvement, and he is a frequent keynote speaker and widely published author on education and society. Prior to assuming his current position at Harvard, Tony was a high school teacher for twelve years; a school principal; a university professor in teacher education; co-founder and first executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility; project director for the Public Agenda Foundation in New York; and President and CEO of the Institute for Responsive Education. He earned his a Masters of Arts in Teaching and Doctorate in Education at Harvard University."

Orig. Pub. The Daily Riff 6/10
Related posts from The Daily Riff:

Daniel Pink, referenced in this essay, click here.

The Global Achievement Gap: The Best Education Book for Everyone? - C.J. Westerberg

"Think Like An Immigrant" - Tom Friedman - " I know one thing - that we aren't telling people the truth -when the President stands up and says if you just work hard and play by the rules, you will be in the middle class. Good luck with that."

Let's Raise Our Kids to be Entrepreneurs. w/TED video

Have We Created a Generation of Followers? - The Atlantic Monthly

Teaching Entrepreneurship to Students. Understanding the 10 Different Types - Fred Wilson

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Would You Hire Your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should Be Teaching Them - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

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7 Skills Schools Should Be Teaching Them By Tony Wagner I've spent the last two years researching and writing a new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need -- and What We Can Do About It.

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Find a variety of free lessons and publications.

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Box It or Bag It is a math program for K-2 teachers who want to surround children with a language-enriched, activity-centered learning environment. Students enjoy hands-on experiences with a variety of materials and are encouraged to learn from each other as well as the teacher.

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Log onto:
https://bridges.mathlearningcenter.org/digital-display-materials
to access a number of digital display materials associated with the Bridges lessons.

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Log onto:
https://bridges.mathlearningcenter.org/resources
to access a number of online Bridges resources.

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Log onto:  https://bridges.mathlearningcenter.org/implementation/pd-library
to acess a variety of professional development materials.

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NY Times Opinion Article...Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way

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NY Times Opinion Article...Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way

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Food for thought about the importance of mixing phonics with whole language reading instruction.

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Opinion | Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way? (Published 2018)

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Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers.

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First Grade Students Research Animals and Create Animal Models 

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First Grade Students Research Animals and Create Animal Models 

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First grade students create models of an animal they have chosen to research.  After a visit to the zoo to see their animal and collect information, first graders have continued their research using a variety of resources.  Each child created a design sketch listing characteristics of the animal and then decided which art medium they would use to create a representation of the animal.  Completed models will be used to construct a storyline zoo project.

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Fourth grade students celebrate the writing process with a Publishing Party.  Students had the chance to read a passage of their stories to the audience and then did a gallery walk to read each other’s stories, leaving compliments and feedback for each other.

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What are the Best Ways to Use Leveled Texts? 

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What are the Best Ways to Use Leveled Texts? 

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On her blog Cult of Pedagogy, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Jennifer Serravallo about the best ways to use leveled texts in the classroom.

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Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and Microsoft Inclusive Classroom

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

A few weeks ago, a teacher named Isabelle O'Kane sent me a direct message on Twitter. She had been reading a debate that was raging all over social media, and she wondered if it was something I might want to write about. The debate took place in response to a single tweet sent out by literacy experts Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell:

The classroom library should NOT be organized according to level, but according to categories such as topic, author, illustrator, genre, and award-winning books. #FPLiteracy pic.twitter.com/hxJNDow3Qz

- Fountas & Pinnell (@FountasPinnell) September 21, 2018

Teachers responded to the tweet from all directions: Some shouted hallelujah, because it supported what they were already doing. Others agreed, but argued that their hands were tied because administration required leveled libraries. Quite a few insisted that the best approach was to do both; yes, students should be able to seek out books based on interest, but without levels, how would they ever find appropriate books on their own? And some threw up their hands entirely, wondering if a single, clear answer was ever going to present itself.

Because my training and classroom work has all been with students in grade 6 and above, I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge on this topic, but it definitely seemed like something teachers needed help with.

So it was pretty serendipitous when literacy consultant and author Jennifer Serravallo contacted me right around that time about her new book, Understanding Texts & Readers: Responsive Comprehension Instruction with Leveled Texts.

In the book, Serravallo takes a deep dive into the question of how best to match texts to readers. She starts with a discussion of why we have leveled texts to begin with, what their original purpose was, and the missteps we often make as teachers when using them. Then she explores the levels themselves-for fiction and non-fiction-and unpacks the characteristics to look for in each one. Finally, she brings it all together, showing teachers how to combine their knowledge of text levels and students to assess student comprehension, set goals, and match students with books that are just right for them.

In our conversation, which you can listen to on the podcast player above, we talked about the mistakes a lot of teachers and administrators make in how they use leveled texts, and what they should be doing instead.

What Are Leveled Texts?

When schools first attempted to differentiate reading instruction, they did it with texts that were written specifically for that purpose, like the SRA cards that were popular in the 1960s and 70s. Although these programs offered different levels to match student readiness, "(they didn't) actually offer kids real language structures or really interesting storylines," Serravallo explains. "And kids were not able to read those with as much comprehension as real children's literature."

In the 1990s, a shift came when teachers started looking at ways to level real books, books that were not written with "levels" in mind. Two types of text leveling emerged around this time:

Quantitative Leveling: Systems like the Lexile Framework leveled texts through computer programs that measured dimensions like text length and complexity.

Qualitative Leveling: This type of leveling is done by humans, and while it considers things like text length and complexity, it also takes more nuanced qualities into consideration, like whether a text delivers information in a purely straightforward way or contains multiple levels of meaning. One popular qualitative system is Fountas and Pinnell's Text Level Gradient.

Common Mistakes with Leveled Texts

When leveled texts are used in classroom and school settings, teachers and administrators make some well-intentioned but significant missteps that can negatively impact students' growth as readers.

1. Leveling Readers Instead of Books

One of the biggest mistakes Serravallo sees is labeling students by text levels. "Levels are meant for books, not for kids," she explains. "There's really no point in time when a kid is just a level, just one. There's a real range, and it depends on a lot of other factors."

This misstep, she says in her book, has had negative consequences. "Kids nationwide have become aware of something that many would argue they shouldn't be aware of at all...causing some students to compete, race through levels, and experience shame."

To compound the problem, a number of schools have begun basing student learning objectives (SLOs)-part of teacher evaluation protocols-on these levels: "(Districts will) say, 'You come up with goals for your students, and then we're going to measure and make sure you met your goals.' And what's happening is that I find teachers are using levels (to measure growth)-'This student's starting off at an L and is going to end up at a P,' or something like that."

This type of system often prompts teachers to put books in students' hands that they're not quite ready for. "The teacher is going to be pushing the student into harder texts in order to meet the goal," Serravallo says. "You've got this kid being pushed through because they can maybe decode the text but not because they're actually getting everything they can from it in terms of comprehension and meaning making. If the kids are not thinking on that level, why be pushing them into harder and harder books? Why not work with them in texts that they choose to help them get more from the texts that they're reading?"

What to do instead: Rather than focus narrowly on text levels, teachers should get to know students as readers from a variety of angles. "Factors such as motivation, background knowledge, culture, and English language proficiency should all be on our radar when considering how to help students find books they'll love, and how to evaluate students' comprehension and support them with appropriate goals and strategies."

2. Restricting Book Choice Based on a Single Assessment

"One of the ways that levels get misused is that teachers administer one assessment," Serravallo says. "It's usually a short assessment. It could be a computer assessment that's a short text with multiple choice, it could be a running record where kids read a selection of a text and answer a few questions. So there's this one assessment, and then from that they get a level or a level range, and they say to the kids, you can only pick from that level range. But the problem is that's misunderstanding all of the different variables that kids bring to the table, things like motivation, prior knowledge, stamina, their command of English, the genre. There's so many variables."

What to do instead: Take multiple factors into account when pairing students with texts. "We need to look at a couple of different assessments," Serravallo recommends, "and we need to account for these variables, and then once we have a sense of about where kids are able to read, we still need to be flexible when they go to choose. So if I have a kid who knows a lot about dinosaurs who typically reads books around Level O-P, if it's a dinosaur book and he wants to read it, and it's a Level R or S, maybe that's okay."

3. Inflexibility

Even if we have a pretty thorough idea of what types of texts would be a good fit for a student, only allowing them to choose books from a narrow range of levels doesn't take other important factors into account. There may be times when a student wants to challenge herself by going for a book that will require more support to get through, and other times when students want to read an easier book for fun.

"Saying to a student, 'You are a Level __ so you can only read Level __ books' is deeply problematic," Serravallo writes in her book. "We can use reading levels to help guide student choice, but levels should never be used to shackle a reader."

What to do instead: Use reading levels as a shortcut to knowing some likely features of books, but allow other factors to influence book choices. In her book, Serravallo shows us how to adjust our language to help students make these decisions for themselves: Instead of saying something like, "That book is too hard for you," she recommends saying something like, "That book is harder than what you typically read. Let's think about how I/your friends can support you as you read, if you find you need it."

4. Organizing Books by Level

While Serravallo admits to organizing the books in her classroom library in leveled bins years ago, "I've changed my thinking after seeing the consequence of what that does to kids' reading identity. What ends up happening is kids go to the classroom library and they say, 'I'm a Q. I'm going to pick a Q book.' And they go to the Q bin and they only look in the Q bin."

What to do instead: "I would organize them by topic, by genre, by author," Serravallo says, "So the first thing kids see when they go to the library is identities. And they think about themselves first before they think about level: Who am I as a reader, and what am I interested in reading?"

For her own purposes, Serravallo would still keep text levels on books, but put them in an inconspicuous place on the book, like on the inside of the front cover. "That way, when a child is holding a book, it's not like everyone can see the level on the book, so it's a little bit more private. But I like that having them on the book, because if I haven't read that book, I can peek at the level and be like, oh yeah, okay. Complex characters in this one. And I can use that to guide my discussions when I'm working with kids."

To learn more, check out Serravallo's book Understanding Texts and Readers, join the Reading and Writing Strategies Community on Facebook, or visit her website at jenniferserravallo.com.

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What Are the Best Ways to Use Leveled Texts?

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Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo (transcript): Sponsored by Peergrade and Microsoft Inclusive Classroom This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

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Strategies to Support Struggling Writers

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Strategies to Support Struggling Writers

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Easy to implement strategies for resistant or struggling writers.

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Types of Struggling Writers

Just like our students, not all struggling writers are the same. Some students struggle with writing because they are stuck for ideas. You know the kid...the one who proclaims, "I don't know what to write," then shrugs and stares blankly at you. Those are also often the students getting up to get another drink of water and staring at a blank page. These students struggle with getting started and knowing what to write about.

Other students struggle because their writing is disorganized and lacks structure. These students will often write, but their writing is disorganized and hard to follow. They often claim to be finished with a writing assignment before it is truely complete.

Finally, another group of students struggle with writing because they feel disconnected from the assignment. They may feel it is not relevant to them or they may not have the background knowledge or expertise to write on the topic.
With a little scaffolding and support, there are many strategies you can implement into your writing instruction to help support your struggling writers.
Stuck for Ideas
When students struggle with coming up with ideas about what to write about, try the following scaffolding tips:
1. Share Ideas before writing

Students orally share ideas before writing (with a peer, as a whole group, or even record ideas using a technology device) - This gets their creative juices flowing. Students who struggle with coming up with their own ideas might get inspired by their classmates' thoughts. Having students share ideas also helps to solidify and ground the idea so it isn't lost.

2. Collaboratively write

This is an opportunity for the whole class to get involved. Instead of having students start writing on their own, first, collaboratively write together as a class. Have different students share ideas to create a collaborative writing sample. This demonstrates for struggling writers how to approach the assignment and it provides them with ideas of what to write about.

3. Use sentence starters

These are really helpful for triggering ideas in struggling writers. Often times a student will say, "I don't know what to write about," and a sentence starter can help guide them with their writing.

4. Writing Warm-up

Writing warm-ups are great to help students get their creative juices flowing. They are also helpful to encourage students to write down their thoughts. Using a writing warm-up like Power Writing or Freewriting: (where students write without stopping or without worrying about spelling or grammar) their ideas can flow and they don't have to deal with writing paralysis.

5. Pre-writing

This is a critical step for helping struggling writers construct ideas. Using tools like brainstorms or Focus Storms, help students quickly get as many ideas as possible. The blank page can be daunting to a young writer who struggles with coming up with ideas. Brainstorming is a powerful tool to help writers flush out all the ideas and then a Focus Storm helps them to organize and fine-tune their ideas. This is also helpful because it is a visual for students to see that they have lots of ideas. If students ever get stuck for ideas, they can refer back to their brainstorm and focus storm.

Disorganization and Lack of Structure

This was one of my biggest struggles as a young writer. I had lots of ideas, but I rarely put them together in a coherent fashion. Instead, my writing was a disorganized, jumbled mess. Many young writers struggle with this aspect of writing, and these scaffolding tips are a best practice when teaching young students. Whether it is a paragraph or an essay, these strategies help support struggling writers in elementary school.

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12 Strategies to Support Struggling Writers in Elementary - TeachWriting.org

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Just like our students, not all struggling writers are the same. Some students struggle with writing because they are stuck for ideas . You know the kid...the one who proclaims, "I don't know what to write," then shrugs and stares blankly at you. Those are also often the students getting

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A blog solely devoted to the teaching of writing. Find a post on helping writers see why we write and much more!

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Exposing, Sharing, & Connecting: Helping Writers See Why We Write

Hello Readers,

Here you are making space within your day to read this post. What has brought you here today? Maybe you're a classroom teacher looking for ideas for writing workshop. Perhaps you're a coach seeking information for a particular teacher. Whatever the reason your purpose will guide how you read and intentionally use the information in this post.

When we know the purpose or the why in our work we work intentionally. As teachers, knowing our writers are working with intention allows us to trust the students. With trust, we can step back and allow students to make the decisions about their writing.

In this post, I am sharing intentional practices that can be used to help students see the purposes of writing. My hope is you will be inspired to give students opportunities to discover their voice through authentic writing purposes.

Exposure To Writing

Read for pleasure

Read to highlight craft

Read to share the sound of the language

Read the writing within their environment

Read to show the vitality and necessity of writing

Share in the Purposes of Writing

Newsletters

Compose your weekly parent letter as a class. As students reflect on the events of the week deciding what information to share they're learning the importance of writing for an audience.

Messages

Leave post-it notes for students with bits of inspiration. Students can later take on this task leaving messages of encouragement for peers.

Agendas

Writing out the daily schedule offers its own opportunities for students to engage in the plans for the day. Intentionally use the agenda as a reference of information throughout the day.

Morning Message

At the end of the day, gather together to write a morning message for the following day. The morning message will greet the students and provide them with directions and information for the day. Writing the morning message offers students to see the planning that goes into writing.

Book Recommendations

Consider writing a book recommendation to a neighboring class. Sharing book recommendations gives students an opportunity to share great literature with others.

Connecting Writers with WRITERS!

Visit author websites and blogs. Many authors share how they became writers, their writing space(s), and how they find ideas.

Young writers will find connections between themselves and the authors they love. Share the author note at the end of a read aloud. Author notes often include fun facts about the author and a photo.

Connect in real time with the authors. You can find many of them on Twitter, they may even reply to your tweets! Kate Messner has compiled a list of writers who will skype with classes for free!

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Exposing, Sharing, & Connecting: Helping Writers See Why We Write

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When we know the purpose or the why in our work we work intentionally. As teachers, knowing our writers are working with intention allows us to trust the students. With trust, we can step back and allow students to make the decisions about their writing.

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Click on the image to connect with Spencer's blog providing videos and book descriptions. Spencer's books Empower, Launch and Making Learning Flow provide a framework for allowing student's to own their learning, using the flow theory to increase student engagement and using DT to boost creativity and bring out the maker in every student.

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Empower: What Happens When Students Own the Learning

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Hey, I’m starting a new series called Empower. It connects to a book we’ll be releasing in a few weeks. Blog Posts on Empowering Students: Who Owns the Learning in Your Classroom? The Real Issue Is

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Trusting Teachers to Innovate by John Spencer

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Trusting Teachers to Innovate by John Spencer

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Spencer reminds us of the innovation that is already happening in our classrooms and provides ideas about how to share our innovation stories with each other.

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John Spencer

Posted on September 29, 2017

If we want to see innovation happening in our schools, we need to trust, encourage, and empower teachers to transform their practice. Too often, teachers are forced to teach inside the box and it can feel frustrating. In this post, I explore why teachers are the innovators, what's getting in the way, and what we can do about it.

Each day, when I ask my kids about their school day, I am blown away by what they are learning. Here is a quick sample from a single day:

My daughter tells about a hands-on, STEM / problem-solving challenge she did in class. It was so hard for her to figure out and she actually ended up in tears but now she's hoping they do another one on next Monday.

My middle son tells me about how his teacher has students celebrate their "epic mistakes" and how she has them talk about what they are learning from them. "I feel like I can choose harder work because I'm not afraid of making mistakes." He then tells me about the Genius Hour project that he's doing and why he loves going to school each day.

My oldest mentions the Socratic Seminars he's doing in Language Arts and the way he's exploring current events through critical thinking. Then his eyes light up as he shares every intricate detail from his engineering class, where he gets a new challenge each week.

These stories aren't rare. Recently, my middle son talked about how cool it was to create his own blog. My daughter talked about the books she got to choose from the library. My oldest son was excited about how challenging his math class has been.

The bottom line is this: amazing things are happening all the time but we've somehow bought into the idea that these things are ordinary simply because they happen often. But they're not ordinary. They're amazing. And they're small innovations that make a huge difference. And it all begins with teachers.

Last year, I created the following video for my cohort:

This is something I believe to my core. The future of education can't be found in a gadget or an app or a program or a product. It doesn't require a think tank full of pundits. No, the future of education can be found in the classroom. Every classroom is packed with creative potential and teachers have the power to make it happen.

It's what happens when we experiment. It's what happens when we give our students voice and choice. It's what happens when we abandon the scripted curriculum and take our students off-road in their learning. It's what happens when we choose to teach to your students rather than teaching to the test. It's what happens when we unleash the creative power of all of our students - when we make the bold decision to let them make things and design things and solve problems that they find relevant.

Sometimes it's messy and even confusing. It often looks humble. But every time students get the chance to be authors, filmmakers, scientists, artists, and engineers, we are planting the seeds for a future we could have never imagined on our own. But it all begins with teachers who are willing to take the creative leap. However, this is sometimes easier said than done.

This last week, I received an email from one of my students. He described the frustrations of developing an engaging unit plan only to be told by his cooperating teacher that he had to use the district's scripted curriculum instead. Now, I don't see anything inherently wrong with boxed curriculum. After all, a great novel is essentially "boxed." The issue is when institutions force teachers to use boxed curriculum in a lock-step way where they lack the permission to make it their own.

This district adopted the prescribed curriculum as a way to embrace "best practices in education." And yet . . . the district also describes the needs to meet the demands of a "21st Century Learning" and "spark innovation."

But here's the thing: innovation requires you to step into the unknown. If we focus all of our attention on best practices and codify these ideas into tightly packaged curriculum, we will inevitably fail to experiment. Here's a little diagram I created on this topic:

Too often, schools talk about innovation but they fail to trust their teachers to innovate in their own practice. Leaders pass out sets of boxed curriculum and we end up with master chefs who are stuck making Hamburger Helper or master artists doing paint by numbers. If we want innovative schools, we need to trust teachers to transform the learning. True, they can get ideas from curriculum and they can seek out experts but ultimately teachers are the ones who are closest to the students.

Okay, so we know that teachers are the key to innovation in the classroom. But sometimes the system seems stacked against them. We have rigid curriculum maps, tight deadlines, bell schedules, and the dreaded standardized tests. In some cases, we have scripted curriculum that strips the craft out of teaching. It can feel hopeless. However, here are some of the strategies I've seen from innovative teachers that I've observed who were stuck in rigid systems.

1. Make it a pilot. If you're not sure if your administration will support an innovative practice, try pitching it as a pilot. By doing this, you are sharing it as a temporary idea rather than a permanent change. Most administrators want to do what's best for kids but they can be reticent to jump on board with a massive change. So, if you can pitch your idea as a small experiment to help out kids, it will be easier to get permission.

2. Find the wiggle room. This is your chance to think divergently. Your rigid curriculum map might say you have 3 days to cover a specific standard but it doesn't tell you which standards you can't teach. So, incorporate more standards and projects. If you have a boxed curriculum, find ways to compact it and move toward a project-based approach. I remember when I had to teach this regimented 4-hour ELL block (one hour for grammar, one for oral language, one for writing, and one for speaking). At first, it felt impossible to innovate. However, I was soon able to turn grammar hour into our blogging and podcasting block and take part of the oral language block and redesign it for STEM. This approach requires you to see things from a different angle and ask, "How can I get away with doing what I know is best for kids while also following the rules?"

3. Get a team on board. If an entire grade level goes to leadership and says, "We want to try this new approach," it becomes harder to say "no." But this goes beyond asking for permission. It's easier to experiment when you have a full team that can provide support along the way. You are able to lean on each other when things feel confusing or frustrating and the change is more likely to become sustainable.

4. Show the research. I remember sending an email to my principal explaining my approach to PBL and design thinking. I shared how it was used in various industries as well as the studies linking the process to deeper learning. I also included research on competency-based and mastery-based assessment. My principal was able to see that I wasn't just conjuring up crazy ideas. I was conjuring up crazy research-based ideas - which is slightly different. In other words, I had been thinking strategically about the changes I was about to implement.

5. Communicate with stakeholders. If you're about to do Cardboard Challenges, send a note home explaining the critical thinking skills and creativity involved. Explain to parents how their kids will be learning to think like engineers. If you are about to launch a blogging project, tell your parents about global collaboration and the power of launching work to the world. Innovation can be messy and you're going to make mistakes. However, if parents are excited about it, they'll view the mistakes as iterations and learning experiences rather than evidence of failure. But this requires us to tell better stories.

I want to take a deeper dive into this last part. When we share the stories of the epic things students are doing, we move from pockets of innovation into a grassroots movement that empowers kids.

This is why it's more vital than ever that we are telling the stories of the good things that are happening in our schools. Here are a few ideas.

1. Share your journey through social media. For the last two years, we have had people use a hashtag for the Global Day of Design. It was so cool to watch it trend on Twitter, wedged in between two snarky hashtags related to political current events. If you clicked on what was trending, you would see mean-spirited memes, more mean-spirited memes, and then suddenly a video of fourth graders making Rube Goldberg machines and then a picture from across the globe students making roller coasters. It was awesome.

2. Have your students publish their work to a real audience. For all the fear surrounding social media, we make a mistake when we say, "avoid this" without saying, "try out this." Too often, the goal is to avoid a digital footprint at all cost rather than finding ways to create a positive digital footprint.

3. Partner with the community. Find ways to invite businesses, organizations, and families into your building. Instead of simply "seeing what's happening," they get a chance to be partners in projects and this leads to better relationships and deeper trust.

4. Brag about your students. Without naming names or identifying too much information, make it your goal as a teacher to tell people on Facebook or Twitter how much you care about your students along with what types of projects they are doing. Most people outside of the classroom are friends with current classroom teachers. Even if they don't comment on the posts, they will tend to view schools more positively when they hear bits and pieces of the cool things teachers are doing.

5. Share your story. If you're a teacher, consider blogging. Produce a podcast. Make a video series. One of the things I've realized is that the media won't invite teachers to the table. You have to choose alternative platforms where you push back against the narrative that our schools are broken and our teachers are awful. So, share your story and let people see the tiny innovations that are making a big difference. It might not seem like a big deal to you but it's a big deal to your students.

Maybe it's time we celebrate teachers. Maybe it's time we invite current classroom teachers to share a vision for the future of education because, honestly, they are the ones who are already making this a reality. And maybe it's time we trust teachers to lead the way in transforming their classrooms into bastions of creativity and wonder.

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John Spencer Posted on September 29, 2017 If we want to see innovation happening in our schools, we need to trust, encourage, and empower teachers to transform their practice. Too often, teachers are forced to teach inside the box and it can feel frustrating.

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Check out this blog computational thinking 

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Check out this blog computational thinking 

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Articles about developing computational thinkers in the classroom and more.

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The demand for computer science (CS) in schools has many teachers wondering which components of CS they should implement first.

A couple of years ago, I asked myself the very same question, and I had to remind myself that creating a computer scientist could take up to 25 years! I was relieved that I wasn't responsible for developing middle school computer scientists in only one semester.

I realized that what I needed to do was build the capacity of my students for deeper learning of the right skills - so they could experience success, which would inspire them to continue studying CS after leaving my class.

Advanced expertise in computer science requires knowledge in mathematics (namely discrete math and linear algebra) and problem-solving, and there are plenty of CS fundamentals to choose from.

In my previous position with Richmond Public Schools, we chose to dive in with computational thinking, programming and coding (yes, in that order). Because computational thinking (CT) is the highest order of problem-solving, is a cross-curricular skill, and is understandable to both machines and humans, I recommend building student CT competency by developing their versatility for recognizing and applying the four elements of CT to familiar problems/situations.

Elem ent 1: Decomposition

To introduce your students to decomposition, begin by having them break down a simple task they do all the time, like brushing their teeth, baking a cake, making a sandwich or tying shoelaces. This will help them focus more on their ability to analyze and synthesize familiar information.

Next, introduce them to more complex problems/scenarios that are both unfamiliar and engaging enough to compel them to decompose them, such as investigating a crime scene, coping with the aftermath of natural disasters or planting a school garden.

Teachers who aren't teaching traditional CS classes can help learners build their decomposition skills in their own subject areas by having them apply the concept to improving their writing, creating timelines, factoring quadratics or understanding living organisms. CS teachers can start building student capacity for decomposition with this CT lesson by Code.org. In this lesson, students assume the role of imaginary players and figure out how to play a game with no given instructions.

Element 2: Pattern recognition

Next, have learners map and explain the similarities/differences or patterns. The beauty of this technique is that once students can describe one category (animal or dessert), they will be able to explain the others by following patterns.

For example, the general characteristics of desserts are that they are all sweet; they can be fruit, custard, puddings or frozen; and usually are served at the end of a meal. One or more dessert may be pink, have fruit and served cold, while another type may be yellow, have sprinkles and not use fruit.

Then task students with either drawing or making a collage of their favorite desserts using the patterns they identified (like in the examples above) to help them. Also, have them reflect on how they'd have to start from scratch with either creating or finding each instance of a dessert if they hadn't first identified essential patterns (classification, color, texture, ingredients).

The primary goal here is to get them to understand that finding patterns helps simplify tasks because the same problem-solving techniques can be applied when the problems share patterns (pattern recognition is also used in math, music and literature, human intelligence, history, weather, etc.).

Class projects can be more authentic by focusing application of pattern recognition in forensics, medical sciences, photo identification or behavioral patterns like web browsing and credit card spending.

Element 3: Abstraction

Abstraction involves filtering out - or ignoring - unimportant details, which essentially makes a problem easier to understand and solve. This enables students to develop their models, equations, an image and/or simulations to represent only the important variables.

Element 4: Algorithm design

Algorithm design is determining appropriate steps to take and organiszing them into a series of instructions (a plan) for solving a problem or completing a task correctly. Algorithms are important because they take the knowledge derived from the previous three elements for execution.

Keep it simple when teaching algorithms to students and have them create small plans using their newly learned CT skills, again using simple functions like brushing teeth, baking a cake, making a sandwich, tying shoelaces. Each algorithm must have a starting point, a finishing point and a set of well-defined instructions in between.

CS teachers will also need to help students understand that algorithm design builds upon the previous three elements - which moves a problem from the modeling phase to the operation stage. Students will also need to learn to design algorithms that are both efficient and allow for automation through the use of computers.

Resources to get started

Here are a number of resources to turn to for help:

Remember, learning has no finish line!

Take a moment to reflect on the words of Dr. Stephen R. Covey, "Though you may find some of it to be simple common sense, remember, common sense is not common practice, and I guarantee that if you will focus your efforts in these areas, you will find that great peace and power will come into your life."

I believe these words can be applied to learning CT (and any new concepts or practices) as we help our students use what they already know to develop their CS superpowers!

Jorge Valenzuela is an educational coach and a graduate teaching assistant at Old Dominion University. He is also the lead consultant for Lifelong Learning Defined, Inc,
a national faculty of the Buck Institute for Education and a national teacher effectiveness coach with the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA). You can connect with Jorge on Twitter @JorgeDoesPBL to continue the conversation.

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The demand for computer science (CS) in schools has many teachers wondering which components of CS they should implement first. A couple of years ago, I asked myself the very same question, and I had to remind myself that creating a computer scientist could take up to 25 years!

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Third grade students are reminded of the flow and routine of reading workshop using easy to read infographics.

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Opportunities for Letter Formation Practice 

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Opportunities for Letter Formation Practice 

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Kindergarten classrooms offer multiple natural materials to reinforce letter formation and provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice forming upper and lower case letters.

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Literacy Invitations in Early Childhood Classrooms 

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Literacy Invitations in Early Childhood Classrooms 

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Opportunities to work with letters creating names and words connect to phonics name studies happening in early childhood classrooms.

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Students have the opportunity to visit the writing table during their open choice investigation time. Using a variety of art mediums and writing utensils, students can create pictures, stories, books, cards and more. This student worked on making his own Pokemon card with a newly created Pokemon character.

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An all time favorite teaching resource and blog sharing Reggio inspired ideas in a number of different content and special areas.

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This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

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Articles about instruction, classroom management, learning theory, technology AND more. You'll find some interesting reads on this witty website.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives.

To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics. If you want to get more specific, use the search bar at the top of this page. Still can't find what you're looking for? Contact our support staff. If they can't help you find it, they'll add your topic to our list of future blog posts.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives. To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics.

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Are you on Twitter? Check out #BuildYourStack

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Are you on Twitter? Check out #BuildYourStack

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Check out the most recent #BuildYourStack blog posts featuring book and resource recommendations curated by NCTE members.

http://bit.ly/2Lw9u2q

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Empowering educators to ignite change and inspire students through #collaborativePD, language acquisition and cultural exchange. #howiparticipate#TeachSDGs

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Essays about children, learning, and teaching. An inspirational read by authors from all facets of the educational field.

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Focused on a set of strongly held beliefs that drive the actions of educators every day, each chapter of the book is focused on a single belief and

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I just started diving into this and I can't wait to get back to it. This book is making me think carefully about teaching, children and parenting.

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Synopsis

The author of the beloved One for the Murphys gives readers an emotionally-charged, uplifting novel that will speak to anyone who's ever thought there was something wrong with them because they didn't fit in.

Everybody is smart in different ways. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing it is stupid."

Ally has been smart enough to fool a lot of smart people. Every time she lands in a new school, she is able to hide her inability to read by creating clever yet disruptive distractions. She is afraid to ask for help; after all, how can you cure dumb? However, her newest teacher Mr. Daniels sees the bright, creative kid underneath the trouble maker. With his help, Ally learns not to be so hard on herself and that dyslexia is nothing to be ashamed of. As her confidence grows, Ally feels free to be herself and the world starts opening up with possibilities. She discovers that there's a lot more to her-and to everyone-than a label, and that great minds don't always think alike.
Read Chapter One here! Teachers - Share (and find!) Fish in a Tree ideas that you have enjoyed using with your kids. Printable Fish in a Tree Teacher's Guide!
Awards and Honors:

Schneider Family Book Award

SCBWI Crystal Kite Winner

ALSC Notable Book of 2016

New York Times Bestseller

Global Read Aloud choice, 2015

SLJ Best Book, 2015

Audible.com (Amazon) Kids Audiobook of Year Winner

Will be published in 15 different languages thus far

ALSC Notable Children's Recordings Nominee

ALSC Notable Children's Book Nominee

Indie Best Book Choice

Amazon Best Book of the month

Amazon Best Book of the Year (9-12 yo), 2015

Amazon bestseller re: books about disabilities

Barnes and Noble ~ Best books about bullying

ALSC Summer Reading List, 2016

SCBWI Summer Reading List, 2016

*State Lists:

Great Stone Face Award Book (New Hampshire)

Colorado State Book Award nominee

Golden Sower Award (Nebraska) nominee

South Carolina Junior Book Award nominee, 2016-2017

Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award (Illinois) nominee, 2016-2017

Iowa Children's Choice Award nominee, 2016-2017

Georgia Children's Book Award nominee, 2016-2017

North Carolina Battle of the Books, 2016-2017

Black-Eyed Susan Book Award (Maryland) nominee, 2016-2017

Maine Student Book Award Nominee, 2016-2017

Buckeye State Award List (Ohio), 2016-2017

William Allen White Award List (Kansas), 2017-2018

Visit Ally's Sketchbook of Impossible Things

Read (or add your own!) SUCCESS STORIES of people who struggled in school and later set the world on fire! (as Mr. Daniels would say ;-) Buy merchandise from a non-profit online store Help yourself to some Fish in a Tree badges
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SOLVING THE SECRET CODE:
HELLO! Below is the code that Mr. Daniels writes on the board for the students to solve. Unfortunately, I will not give you an answer for it. However, I will tell you a couple of things:

1. Yes, it can be solved.

2. Each letter stands for another letter in the alphabet and follows a pattern. So, for example, if I told you that every letter in this word < ALD > was really the letter that is three letters after it in the alphabet, <ALD > would really be < DOG >. This code below follows a pattern similar to this.

3. Writing out the entire alphabet for yourself and experimenting will make this easier to solve.

4. If you find this hard, don't quit! It's supposed to be hard and it feels AWESOME to solve something difficult.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The videos below were done in conjunction with Global Read Aloud. Each video covers 8 chapters of the book. Video 1: Chapter 1 - 8 Video 2: Chapter 9 - 17 Video 3: Chapter 18 - 24 Video 4: Chapter 25 - 33 Video 5: Chapter 34 - 42 Video 6: Chapter 43 - end I begin each taping with a reading of the last chapter in the block and then answer questions form readers for that chapter block ONLY. The last video has a bit more of an overview.

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Synopsis The author of the beloved One for the Murphys gives readers an emotionally-charged, uplifting novel that will speak to anyone who's ever thought there was something...

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One of my favorite new read aloud finds. A great way to connect to reading and writing workshops.

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Find out more about people centered design and where it can be weaved into what you already teach. Download the DEEPDT Playbook and check out other resources from Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation.

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Fulton County Schools

In 2020, a team of MV Ventures senior consultants worked with two new Fulton County STEM schools for a year-long consulting partnership. With design thinking at the core of both programs, MVV consultants utilized a hybrid of virtual and in-person sessions to engage with teams of teacher leaders from both schools for comprehensive design thinking training and curriculum design, supporting both administration and faculty during the 2020-2021 school year.

The first half of the partnership involved a deep-dive into the design thinking methodology, allowing participants to become both users and designers. Team members got a clear understanding of what design thinking is, why it's such a powerful framework for problem-solving, and what it looks like in the classroom. The second half of the parnership supported the teams to infuse design thinking into the curriculum design including unit plans and design challenges throughout each of the different pathways offered to students.

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In 2020, a team of MV Ventures senior consultants worked with two new Fulton County STEM schools for a year-long consulting partnership. With design thinking at the core of both programs, MVV consultants utilized a hybrid of virtual and in-person sessions to engage with teams of teacher leaders from both schools for comprehensive design thinking training and curriculum design, supporting both administration and faculty during the 2020-2021 school year.

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Articles and videos covering project based learning, social/emotional learning, teacher development, technology integration and more. A great resource to share with parents as well.

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

The benefits of movement in the classroom aren't limited to younger students. Pairing new words and concepts with gestures or dance moves locks in understanding-and active brain breaks prime students to learn even more.

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A free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education.

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Design thinking materials shared with faculty at the New Faculty Orientation.

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Model curious learning with your students and challenge them to share their wonders with the class.
https://wonderopolis.org/

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Getting to Know your Students as Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

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Getting to Know your Students as Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

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A quick read about connecting with your students as readers during the first few weeks of school.

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The first couple of weeks back to school can feel hectic. There's routine-establishing, environment-orienting, and community building to be done! As a teacher who wants to instill in all my students a love of reading and the skills to do it well, I want also to make sure that getting to know my readers is also at the very top of my list. To help teachers fit this effort into an already busy time, what follows are some of my favorite ways to make this a do-able part of the first days back.

1. Kidwatch. Get kids set up with books of their choosing within the first couple days of school. Set aside time to for kids to read independently an d watch what happens. Who's spacing out? Who's giggling at the funny parts? Who is asking to use the bathroom? Whose eyes are glued to the pages? Who's staring at you instead of looking at the book? I like keeping notes about this on a simple class list where I make up annotations as I watch.

2. Invite Reflection. Use the reader's notebook as a spot for students to reflect on their reading histories, and to plan for their reading life this coming school year. For example, you may invite students to list books they've read that are great and those they've read that are "the pits" and then to look for patterns to inform future book choices.

3. Make the Rounds. Since many students' stamina still needs to be built and supported at the start of a new school year, sitting down to do lengthy conferences can make it hard to find time to spend with every student. Instead, make the rounds in your classroom with quick 90-second compliment conferences. Here's how it could go: First, pull up alongside a student and spend 30-45 seconds researching: ask a few questions, listen to the student read aloud, or/and take a peek at anything he or she has written about reading (sticky notes, notebook entries). Jot down some notes about the student's strengths as a reader and ideas you have for next steps. Then, offer the child a compliment-in-a-paragraph: name what they've demonstrated they're able to do, how that's helpful to them as a reader, and an example from their own work. Click here to watch videos of me using compliment conferences with three fourth graders.

4. Prompt for Quick Jots During Read Aloud. For fluent writers (typically grades 2 and above), ask students to come to the gathering area one day with a clipboard or notebook stickered with four post its. Have them put their initials on the upper corner of each one. Then, read aloud a favorite short story or short picture book. During the reading, ask them to stop and jot four times. If it's fiction, you may have them jot once for Plot and Setting (Why did X happen? What problems is the character facing? Retell the most important events so far. Describe where the story is taking place.); Character (What kind of person is X? How is X impacting Y? How is X changing?); Vocabulary and Figurative Language (Explain what X means in this story.); and Themes and Ideas (What lesson can you learn from this story? What does X symbolize? What are some social issues the author is writing about in this story?) Then, collect the sticky notes and sort/rank them. Put those students with the strongest answers to the first question in one pile, those with the most simplistic answers in another. You've got your first several rounds of small groups planned right there!

5. Listen to them Talk. After a read aloud, and/or after an independent reading period, invite students to have a conversation about what they've read as a whole class, in small groups, or with partners. Listen with two lenses: What are they showing you they are understanding about their reading? This gives insight into their comprehension. Do you hear them talking about plot? Characters? Theme? How strong is their understanding? Second, listen to how they are discussing. This gives insight into their conversation. Are they sticking to a topic? Asking questions? Debating? Adding on to others' thoughts?

It's easy to become overwhelmed with all the assessments we feel we have to do (or get told we have to do). Often, truly getting to know our readers doesn't mean we need to rely on a tool we've purchased. Instead we should trust what we can know by listening, watching, talking, reading; we can learn a lot by keeping eyes and ears open in the first weeks of school.

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Reading Teacher Priority One: Getting to Know Your Students as Readers

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The first couple of weeks back to school can feel hectic. There's routine-establishing, environment-orienting, and community building to be done! As a teacher who wants to instill in all my students a love of reading and the skills to do it well, I want also to make sure that getting to know my readers is also at the very top of my list.

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Ten goals to help determine where to start when scaffolding students in their writing from Jennifer Serravallo's The Writing Strategies book.

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It's crucial to spend time making sure you're choosing the right goal to focus on for each writer in your classroom. Choosing an appropriate goal requires that you have a deep knowledge of your students, developed through assessments and by talking to your students and getting to know them as people. You'll likely plan to spend time observing them as they write and meeting with them in conferences to learn about their interests and hopes for their writing. You'll also likely do more formal assessments such as asking them to write "on demand" (completing a piece of writing in one sitting) and looking at those pieces for qualities of writing that you hope to teach.

The ten goal categories I use are: Composing with Pictures, Engagement, Generating Ideas, Focus, Structure/Organization, Elaboration, Word Choice, Conventions: Spelling, Conventions: Punctuation & Grammar, and Partnerships & Clubs. I have arranged these ten goals into a hierarchy to help me prioritize when I discover a student could use support with more than one goal (see image at top left). Think of it not as a hierarchy of most important to least, or from simplest to most sophisticated. Instead, this is a hierarchy of action. For example, if I notice a child could use support in two areas-say, structure and elaboration-I'm inclined to start with the one that's closest to the top (structure) and work my way down (elaboration). Think of that example. Why teach a child to fill her page with details if the details are disorganized and it will make the writing difficult to follow?

The first goal is composing with pictures. It's a goal centered around teaching children to use sketches and illustrations to tell stories, teach, and/or persuade. The idea behind this first goal is that even before children are able to write conventionally with words, they can compose pieces of work using what they can do- draw pictures. Also, as children get older, using pictures as way to practice qualities of good writing, and as a way to plan their writing, has lots of value.

Engagement comes next because unless students see themselves as writers, have the stamina to sit and write, and want to write, it'll be hard to focus on qualities. They've got to practice to improve.

Generating ideas is a goal that's close to the top of the list because it's crucial to help children come up with their own topics and ideas for their writing. An inability to do so could also be a root cause of disengagement with writing. Independent writers need a never-ending bank of things to write about.

Focus is the next goal category because when a writer sets out to write a piece, there should be something that helps it to be cohesive. It could be an idea, it could be a thesis statement, it could be a focus on a period of time (as is sometimes the case with some stories). But it can't be wandering all over the place. Without focus, it's hard to know what details to add and what to take away, and it's hard to have a purpose or meaning behind the writing.

Next: structure. A piece needs to be organized so that a reader is able to follow the story, the argument, or the categories of what's being taught. Having a clear structure, and having solid parts within that structure (lead, middle, ending, for example), helps a writer to know how to use detail effectively.

The next two goals- elaboration and word choice -appear side-by-side on the hierarchy. Each goal will help writers fill out the structure they've created. Elaboration is about helping children to add the right amount and the right types of details to connect to the meaning, genre, and structure of their piece. Word choice is about the careful decisions a writer makes on the word level.

The next two goals are about conventions-one on spelling and one on grammar. These live side by side in the hierarchy as well. They are toward the bottom of the hierarchy not because I think they are less important, but because I'm more apt to help a student with one of the other goals before these if the others aren't solid. Students will have more energy for editing their spelling, or considering their punctuation choices, or looking over their piece to correct dangling modifiers if they care about what they wrote and there are sufficient, well-organized details included in the piece.

The final goal focuses on partnerships and writing clubs. This is one that you'll likely weave throughout your whole year for every student. There may also be some students who would benefit from a particular, personalized focus on how to collaborate within a group.

Just as I feel sure enough that this hierarchy is largely what drives my decision making when I work with student writers, I'd be lying if I said there aren't exceptions. Perhaps, for instance, the reason a student's writing volume is low is because she doesn't have any ideas. Well, in that case, I'd start with the goal on generating strategies. Or maybe a student needs help with structuring his writing, but there are so few details that there isn't much to put a structure around. In that case, I might help him brainstorm what else he could say, and then we could go back to organize it.

Some of you may wondering: what about voice and craft? I didn't make either a goal on its own because I believe writer's voice is communicated through many aspects of writing including syntax de cisions (which would fall under the punctuation and grammar goal) and the vocabulary she chooses to use (which falls under the word choice goal). A writer makes craft decisions at many points of the process and in many aspects of the piece, including the details she chooses to include (elaboration) and how the piece flows (organization and structure). In a way, to me it seems like writing well is all about craft and voice.

These 10 goals are the chapters for my soon-to-be-released Writing Strategies Book. Each chapter has anywhere from 20-45 strategies that will help writers work toward the goal, with a total of 300 strategies across the book. For more information, visit here.

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It's crucial to spend time making sure you're choosing the right goal to focus on for each writer in your classroom. Choosing an appropriate goal requires that you have a deep knowledge of your students, developed through assessments and by talking to your students and getting to know them as people.

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Make Reading Come Alive With QR codes by Dr. Stephanie Affinito

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Make Reading Come Alive With QR codes by Dr. Stephanie Affinito

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I found this blog post so interesting and wonder what it would look like for our grade 3-5 readers!

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I have a reluctant reader at home. He enjoyed the same reading experiences as his older brother and twin sister, had reading and writing models at home and had access to plenty of books. But, as much as it pains me to admit it, he is still a reluctant reader. A reluctant reader that has taught his mother plenty of lessons on what it means to truly feel like a reader. I have reminded my son that books are like presents, just waiting to be opened. That books are patient and the right one is still waiting for him. That one day, books will help change his life, if he lets them. In my quest to open the door to a love of reading, I have found the power in using QR codes to make his reading experience interactive, involved and engaging and I imagine this can help other students find reading a more interactive and personal experience as well.

I am a great proponent of using technology and digital tools to connect readers together, share conversations about books and build a community of readers. My son has helped me reimagine how those same tools can make reading a more interactive and 'real' experience during reading as well. Enter QR (Quick Response) codes. I use QR codes for many instructional reasons: as listening stations, as writing celebrations, as methods for accessing resources quickly and even connecting and communicating with parents. But I had not yet tapped into the power of using QR codes to help bring a book to life. That is, until my son gave me the idea to do so.

When my son does read, he enjoys the I Survived Series by Lauren Tarshis. He was getting ready to read his next book in the series, The Joplin Tornado, 2011. I asked if he would share his book with me so I could add a surprise to it. After reading the text myself, I gathered multimedia resources that I knew would enhance his understanding of the book and make the reading come alive. Here are the resources I collected:

Each resource was chosen to help him visualize the book in his mind, actually 'see' the events unfold and help him go above and beyond the book to connect to his own personal interests. I linked these resources to QR codes, taped them to sticky notes and then strategically placed them throughout the book for him to scan as he read.

His interest was real. We downloaded the QR scanner onto his device and he scanned the links as we came upon them in the book. He gained a clear understanding of where the book took place, truly understood the kind of devastation the characters were dealing with and became more engaged in his reading. When he asked to keep reading and if all books could come this way, I knew I was on to something.

Now, I know that I cannot add QR codes to every book he reads to increase engagement and understanding, but I can teach him how to seek out these multimedia resources on his own to support his own interests and strategic actions as a reader. Many adults read with a device nearby to look up locations, Google a concept they had not heard about or to simply see something in action. Why shouldn't our students have the same luxury? We want students to know that books come alive in our head and in our heart simply by reading them, but by reading with a curious mind and technology by our side, we have the power to turn reading into and a more engaging and personalized experience.

Anyone want to join me for a collaborative venture? Send me the titles your reluctant readers are reading and I will create a text set linked to QR codes to support engagement and interaction with the book. Together, we can create and share these text sets to benefit other students and increase reading engagement!

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I have a reluctant reader at home. He enjoyed the same reading experiences as his older brother and twin sister, had reading and writing models at home and had access to plenty of books. But, as much as it pains me to admit it, he is still a reluctant reader.

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Counting on Community by Innosanto Nagara

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Counting on Community by Innosanto Nagara

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I spied this on the book shelves in our preschool classrooms! A beautiful counting book using representations from a variety of cultural backgrounds and places around the world.
http://www.aisforactivist.com/books/counting-on-community/