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Book Review: The Priority List by David Menasche

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Book Review: The Priority List by David Menasche

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KIRKUS REVIEW

Inspiring memoir from a young teacher who refused to give up after a brain cancer diagnosis.

The idea of the priority list came to Menasche in his early days teaching honors and AP English at a Miami magnet school, when his students were having trouble relating to Shakespeare's Othello. In an effort to help them, he presented a list of words that applied to everyone's life-" honor, love, wealth, power, career, respect "-and asked them to order the words according to the importance they might have had for Othello. The list, which he modified over the years to include more abstract ideas, became one of his standard teaching tools, and it helped students connect with the literary characters and reflect on their own priorities. "Their lists revealed more about their lives and what mattered to them than anything they ever said aloud," he writes. Only in 2006, after he was diagnosed with brain cancer at 34, did Menasche write his own list. He was dismayed to find that the top items on the list were friendship and education rather than love or his marriage. After two emergency operations and continuous chemotherapy, he managed to lead a relatively normal life and continue teaching for six more years. He describes his return to the classroom after the first operation as one of the happiest days of his life, and he explains that since he was childless, his students were like family to him. When his health deteriorated and he was finally forced to give up teaching in 2012, he was deeply depressed. Then he made the audacious decision to travel the country and see how his former students were doing, and he discovered that the bonds he had formed with them remained strong. Student comments at the conclusion of each chapter celebrate the author's continuing influence on their lives.

A beautiful meditation.

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THE PRIORITY LIST by David Menasche | Kirkus Reviews

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Inspiring memoir from a young teacher who refused to give up after a brain cancer diagnosis. The idea of the priority list came to Menasche in his early days teaching honors and AP English at a Miami magnet school, when his students were having trouble relating to Shakespeare's Othello.

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Article: "How to Digest Books Above Your "Level"

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Article: "How to Digest Books Above Your "Level"

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How To Digest Books Above Your “Level” And Increase Your Intelligence

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Far From Dunn: The Wendell Dunn Story (Part 2)

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Book Review of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

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Book Review of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

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Excellent biography of Bobby Kennedy by MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

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URL Shortener, Branded Short Links & Analytics | TinyURL

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lino is an online web sticky note service that can be used to post memos, to-do lists, ideas, and photos anywhere on an online web canvas. lino is a completely free service that runs on all popular web browsers.

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Nearpod: Foster a love of learning in every student

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Create active learning experiences students can’t wait to be a part of.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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Article: 'May the odds be ever in your favor'. . . 

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Article: 'May the odds be ever in your favor'. . . 

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Corvallis High School freshman had teamwork, physical and mental challenges and dramatic fun on Wednesday with the culmination of "The Hunger Games" project.

English teacher Suzi Pliley has taught the book "The Hunger Games" for six years and developed activities to enhance learning.

"Every year it has been getting better and better the games are more interesting and well thought-out," she said.

The Hunger Games-themed day is cross-curricular with academic learning in English, physical education, health, art, science, math and computer tech classes.

"Art students have made all of our canvases, sets and do the make-up applications," Pliley said.

Health educator Deana Burch teams up with Pliley to design the challenges and run the day.

"Students have to perform CPR as one of the challenges," Pliley said. "They have to know food groups and know facts from the Hunger Games books."

The preparation has been going on for weeks with students divided into districts doing team-building exercises where they decided their tributes (two boys and two girls), game makers, mentors, stylists and avoxes (servants). The teams created wardrobes, campaign signs, flags, and videos to support their tributes using certain propaganda techniques.

The videos were shown each morning for a week during the live-streaming announcements to the entire high school.

The gym was filled with cheers and applause for the opening ceremony similar to the opening of the games in the popular book and movie.

The stars of the show and emcees for the day were Caesar Flickerman (junior Michael McKay dressed in a sparkly blue suit, blue wig, blue eyebrows and orange face make up) and Claudia Templesmith (aka sophomore Madison Bierer with curly red hair and a sequined shirt).

"I'm so excited to bring the sixth annual Hunger Games to you courtside," announced Flickerman to the energized students. "This is truly the highlight of everyone's year here in the Capitol. We look forward to the games and may the odds always be ever in your favor."

Cheering, applause and loud music filled the gym.

The districts paraded with their flags, signs and wardrobes and team members explained how they contributed to their district.

Past winners from the Hunger Games were introduces as royalty and the games began.

"Hunger Games is amazing," McKay said in an interview between the highly-scripted events. "I've been doing it for three years as Caesar Flickermann - he is outgoing, energetic, excited and over-the-top in everything. So in doing this I have to channel my 'over-the-top-ness.'"

McKay said that other than violence and death the class reenacts "The Hunger Games" in the indoor field day.

"One of the coolest things is how it brings together all of the different subjects and all of these freshmen topics are presented in such a fun an interactive way," he said. "It is cool to see the excitement of learning that this brings."

Bierer said she was pleased to be able to participate in the exciting day as a sophomore.

"It's good to be back," she said.

The games and challenges throughout the day required tributes to use their strength, stamina, knowledge and problem solving skills.

In a dramatic finish of running, dodging balls and making his way to the finish, Clay Barcus was this year's winner over the other tributes. He received a trophy, congratulations and will return next year as royalty. His district, 4, will receive a meal on the Monday after spring break and each member receives 10 extra-credit points.

Barcus said winning felt good.

"I didn't think I would make it this far," he said. "I got stuck when I found the water bottle but I knew iodine purified water so I solved that problem and then ran as fast as I could. The whole day was a great day of learning and fun."

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'May the odds be ever in your favor'; Corvallis students take part in Hunger Games-themed competition

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Corvallis High School freshman had teamwork, physical and mental challenges and dramatic fun on Wednesday with the culmination of "The Hunger Games" project. English teacher Suzi Pliley has taught the book "The Hunger Games" for six years and developed activities to enhance learning.

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Template for Creating a Single-Point Rubric

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Template for Creating a Single-Point Rubric

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Template for Creating a Single-Point Rubric

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Example of Single-Point Rubric for a Presentation

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Six Reasons to Try a Single-Point Rubric

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Six Reasons to Try a Single-Point Rubric

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Edutopia article on single-point rubric with links to additional articles and templates.

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A format that provides students with personalized feedback and works to keep them from focusing solely on their grade.

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Holocaust Education - Teach about the Holocaust and empower middle and high school educators

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NY Times articles paired with topics from a variety of subject areas

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How far would you go to follow your moral beliefs if they conflicted with the laws of the state?

Sophocles' Greek tragedy "Antigone," which has been called " the most powerful political play ever written," has posed this question in performances around the world for over 2,000 years, and continues to be just as relevant today as when it was written in 441 B.C.

Though we offer options for considering the play through adaptations from many other times and places, in this Text to Text we focus primarily on pairing Sophocles' work with the work of a contemporary Spanish flamenco dance company. "Antigona" reanimates the play in all its roiling passion, despair and sacrifice - through flamenco as well as through the street-dance style of krumping.

Read more...

Although Reconstruction took place 150 years ago, its echoes are still being felt across the country - in the campus protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, an entrenched racial economic inequality and a longstanding voting rights battle. What happened during the post-Civil War period, and how we understand what happened, matters.

In this Text to Text lesson, we pair Eric Foner's Op-Ed essay "Why Reconstruction Matters" with an excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois's 1935 book "Black Reconstruction in America." Both document how biased historiography from the early 20th century has helped to perpetuate inequality and injustice for generations of Americans.

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How private should your genetic information be? Can scientific researchers and pharmaceutical companies use your cells for the sake of scientific advancement? These are not just hypothetical questions. For the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, and for more and more patients and their families, these are pressing ethical questions that need answers and clear policies.

For this Text to Text, we invite students to explore the science and ethics of using human cells and tissue for medical research through the lens of Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," and a related 2013 Op-Ed.

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On Feb. 3, 2015, a Times News Alert announced the stunning headline: " Harper Lee, Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' Is to Publish a Second Novel. "

Fifty-five years after "Mockingbird" first appeared, this surprise announcement created a literary sensation. The new book, "Go Set a Watchman," already tops pre-order bestseller lists and has spurred its own share of controversy.

Whether you've responded to this news with delighted anticipation, concerned skepticism or something in between, the recent attention to Ms. Lee and her work reminds us of the central place "Mockingbird" has in our literary culture. It's a perennial favorite in schools and, according to one study, the most-recommended book among American readers.

Although the themes, setting and characters of "Mockingbird" could be paired with any number of pieces from The Times's vast archive, our guest writer, Laura Tavares from Facing History and Ourselves, has chosen a recent article that situates the novel in its historical context and also raises important questions about race, justice and memory in our society today.

Below, she pairs Chapter 15 of the novel with a recent Times article on the Equal Justice Initiative report documenting the history of racial lynching in the United States.

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In this Text to Text we feature an excerpt from " Speak," a 1999 National Book Award finalist that is regularly taught, and regularly challenged, in schools across the country.

We've paired the novel, which is about a high school freshman who is sexually assaulted at a party, with a 2013 Op-Ed essay by a woman who was raped by a classmate when she was 16.

As with all our lesson plans, but especially one about a subject this sensitive, please preview the material below to make sure it is appropriate for your students.

Read more...

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Text to Text - The Learning Network Blog - The New York Times

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How far would you go to follow your moral beliefs if they conflicted with the laws of the state? Sophocles' Greek tragedy "Antigone," which has been called " the most powerful political play ever written," has posed this question in performances around the world for over 2,000 years, and continues to be just as relevant today as when it was written in 441 B.C.

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2017-2018 Year-End Roundup of NYT Lesson Plans

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2017-2018 Year-End Roundup of NYT Lesson Plans

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At the end of every school year, we round up all the lesson plans we've published and list them by category so teachers can find them easily. Below, our 2017-18 collection, but you can find the 2016-17 list here, and earlier lists going back to 2010 on our old site.

As always, much of our work responded to important breaking news. This year that included lessons on the Parkland shootings, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, the #MeToo movement, immigration, the crisis in Myanmar and more.

But every year we also try to find ways to go far beyond the front page to use articles and images across sections of The Times to teach more evergreen skills and topics. In 2017-18 we took deep dives into bioethics, comics, music, student activism, podcasting, argument-writing, mindfulness and more.

What would you like us to cover next school year? Let us know in the comments, and have a wonderful summer.

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Literacy Skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening

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Year-End Roundup, 2017-18: All Our Lesson Plans, All in One Place

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At the end of every school year, we round up all the lesson plans we've published and list them by category so teachers can find them easily. Below, our 2017-18 collection, but you can find the 2016-17 list here, and earlier lists going back to 2010 on our old site.

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NYT Learning Network Contest: Linking Classic Texts to the World Today

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NYT Learning Network Contest: Linking Classic Texts to the World Today

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Contests

The Learning Network runs challenges for teenagers all year long, but when we announce a new one, it's always with trepidation. Will it be too hard? Have we been clear enough about what we're looking for? Will anyone out there actually take the time to do it?

Well, in the case of the challenge we announced in December - to connect something you're studying in school with the world today - we needn't have worried. Over 1,200 students suggested interesting thematic links between recent Times articles and literary, historical and scientific texts and topics like "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Walden," the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chandrasekhar Limit and the California gold rush.

Some texts came up so often that, if you're a teacher currently working with any of them, you could do worse than to search this post to find the many and varied ways students see their resonance. "Brave New World," "Fahrenheit 451," "The Prince," "1984," "Othello" and "Macbeth" are in that category.

Certain issues in the news also appeared in all kinds of contexts. The #MeToo movement reminded students of literature like "Jane Eyre" and "The Handmaid's Tale," but one student also thought Newton's first two laws of motion applied, while another saw an analogy to the rock cycle in geology. Participants discovered that fake news is old news, with clear parallels in the plots of "The Crucible" and "The Great Gatsby." President Trump was compared to literary characters including Macbeth and Grendel, and his policies were invoked in examining topics as varied as "The Scarlet Letter" and the Indian Removal Act.

Below, in alphabetical order, is a list of winners, runners-up and honorable mentions, including full essays by our top eight winners. All told, the list represents the work of 50 students, more than we usually call out in our contests. But not only were there simply that many ideas we wanted to honor, we also think the variety and originality of the choices speak for themselves: Any future student who wonders what school-assigned reading has to do with "the real world" only has to look at this list to see how easy it is to answer that question.

Winners

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One of our winners linked an editorial headlined "Thought Control, Trump-Style" to "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. Credit Caroline Gamon

Zoe Georgulas, 17, New Tech High @ Coppell: "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury and " Thought Control, Trump-Style "

Is it really possible to control how people think? Today we are inundated with media from the moment we wake up: images, text messages, news stories. In school, students read articles, novels, and textbooks. If we took all of these stimulants away, would we still be able to think for ourselves, or would we lose the motivation to do so?

This theme is one at the forefront of Ray Bradbury's novel, "Fahrenheit 451," which I recently read for my Literature class. The story examines a dystopian society where books have been banned completely. The average people in this story seem to lack emotional complexity; they have no desire to read because they have been taught that books made people upset. In the novel, there are a few people who question the status quo, but the majority of people live in a state of blissful ignorance.

Though the novel is meant to depict a contemporary society that Bradbury could not have predicted, there are elements of its narrative that are uncannily similar to our world. Specifically, the mindset of our leaders. Following the mandate from the president disallowing the use of seven scientific words by the CDC in budget documents, I read an article in the New York Times called "Thought Control, Trump-Style" published on December 18, 2017. The Trump administration has almost completely erased any trace of the LGBT+ community on government websites and banned the phrase "climate change" from use by the Department of Agriculture. This virus has infected so many establishments that its ban on seven words in budget documents pales in comparison.

Why are our leaders seeking to control the media we consume? Even the controversy of "fake news" is an attempt to restrict the press we see to only one side of the story. Our government has become a Mind Flayer of sorts: it sees itself as a superior race of thinkers and feels a need to dominate other beings to the point of mind control. This evil and fantastical government is what Ray Bradbury was trying to warn against in his novel. Complacency only breeds complacency. Congress will surely be more effective in passing legislation that Republicans are in favor of if the only news consumed by the American public leans to the far right, but what good does it do us as a society to all agree?

American democracy is predicated on freedom of speech and the desire to seek knowledge. The very idea of precluding this information is a threat to our republic. It is scary to think that Bradbury saw signs of today's society almost seventy years ago. Perhaps even scarier is how many people in today's society have failed to become Guy Montags. It would be difficult to find someone who does not agree with the dangers presented in this book, but, unfortunately, it is not hard to find someone who agrees with the thought control of America's own Mind Flayer.

If complacency breeds complacency, will deliberate minds produce deliberate actions?

Samantha Jones, 16, Concord Carlisle Regional High School: "Walden" and " Dropping Out of College Into Life "

It is fairly well known that Henry David Thoreau ventured off into Walden Woods to live in solidarity for two years. The purpose of this endeavor was not only to rid himself of society's frivolities but to see what the woods could teach him. Thoreau's philosophy on education was a central theme to his books, and details that learning through experience is far more beneficial than in a classroom. This belief parallels in Rainesford Stauffer's "Dropping Out of College Into Life," which accounts for her decision to leave college and why it was crucial to her education. In the article Stauffer explains school does not prepare students for failure, and instead teaches them to avoid it at all costs. From this, students develop a complex fear of failure early on in their academic careers.

Stauffer's story begins her freshman year of college, when she remembers this paralyzing fear. She recalls going from a confident student; optimistic about the year, to a terrified, voiceless wreck. Her high school education had prepared her for the coursework but not the reality her actions impacted her future, and could possibly mean failure. Stauffer became so petrified that she stopped eating and participating in classes, dropped courses, lost weight, and eventually dropped out of college altogether. She'd failed, and her worst fear had become a reality.

Yet, somehow this wasn't as crushing as she thought it would be. Stauffer moved home, and inadvertently started seeking out education the same way Thoreau did: through experience. She found that the hands on experience of ballet and yoga studios and a nonprofit organization furthered her education more than any college course ever could. Eventually Stauffer found a way to finish her degree at the New School, a collection of universities that offered credit for real-life experience instead of academic courses. She went from the lowest point in her life to one of the highest, and all she had to do was fail.

The moral is clear: there are gaps in our education system, and because of these gaps students aren't adequately prepared for their own futures. In his book Walden, Thoreau elaborates on the ideas Stauffer touches on in her article. As stated before, he believed learning through experience was exponentially better than a in classroom. When a rigid curriculum with expectations is set in place, students aren't given the same hands on learning as they would be without one. Just as Stauffer embraced this learning style in the New School, Thoreau did so in Walden Woods. For that is all Walden really is; Thoreau learning from nature by immersing himself in it, instead of seeing it on the pages of a book. A quote from Walden most fitting is as follows, "We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe" (Walden 10/15/1859.)

Lily Langrind, 17, Concord Carlisle High School: "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh and " Checking My Male Privilege "

Most of the literature I have explored in my English classes have been novels and plays with sophisticated language and complex storylines, but this semester we read an eye-opening essay about racism- "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh-which finally made me realize that what my teachers say is true: the things we read and discuss do apply to the real world.

I read Charles Blow's editorials regularly. The effect of his words is sharp and impactful. When I came across "Checking My Male Privilege" after the deluge of sexual harassment accusations came out in Hollywood and Washington, the connection was obvious.In "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," McIntosh emphasizes how in our society, white privilege is so lethal because its beneficiaries are "carefully taught not to recognize [it]." How can racism be eradicated if the people with advantages don't even know they have them? Unless white people recognize all the ways our quality of life can be so much higher simply because of the color of our skin, we will forever have this invisible pack full of assets and protections secured tightly on our backs.

If we apply the same logic McIntosh uses in her essay to our discussions about sexual harassment in America, it's easy to see that most men are also conditioned to evade any blame whatsoever for the injustices so many women face. Just like the white people who attribute their success to their own merit and turn a blind eye to their privileges, the men who focus on the "good guys" who don't grope or whistle or slap are choosing to overlook the privilege of physical dominance. It seems simple, but men can enjoy the luxury of knowing that a vast majority of the time, women don't have the physical superiority to victimize or overpower men for unwanted sexual behavior.

In cases of both sexism and racism, privileges hurt both those without and with the privileges. White people might not condone racism, but their blindness to privilege leads them to believe that racism may not be as bad as the underprivileged make it seem. As Blow writes, it's extremely difficult to understand how bad something is if you never experience it firsthand, and so listening to people with fewer privileges is one of the best tools we can use to evaluate the state of discrimination black people and women are immersed in.

Alicia Li, 16, Livingston High School: "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and " Will America Choose King's Dream or Trump's Nightmare? "

Beneath the shimmery surface of American ideals, from John Winthrop's iconic imagery of the country as a "city upon a hill" to the twentieth century metaphor of a "melting pot" accepting all cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities, recent events reveal the underlying racism of a nation claiming to be "post-racial." In George Yancy's "Will America Choose King's Dream or Trump's Nightmare?" the professor illustrates how Trump's offensive and racist statements pertaining to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations highlight America's deceptive façade as a beacon for civil liberty. A classic piece of American literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald unveils the flaws of high society during the Roaring Twenties, a period of both economic prosperity and unrivaled income inequality, through the narration of Nick Carraway. Reflecting current news, "The Great Gatsby" showcases how harsh reality is often hidden under a superficial exterior.

After moving to Long Island, Carraway optimistically believes in the American dream of working hard to be rewarded and achieve upward mobility. However, his encounters reveal the faults of the rich whose lifestyles and wealth are so widely admired. Tom Buchanan, a Yale graduate from a prominent family, has more than enough wealth to transport his polo ponies across the country while owning an elaborate mansion framed by French windows and half an acre of fresh roses. Despite Buchanan's dignified appearance and prestige, Carraway uncovers the truth of his racism, domestic violence, and immorality. At his own dinner party, Buchanan recommends a book claiming the importance of the dominance of the white race. That same night, a woman reveals his infidelity and the fact that everyone in town is aware of it. Not only is the man unabashedly unfaithful, but he frequently leaves bruises on his wife and breaks his mistress's nose during a disagreement. Meanwhile, the vanity of his wife and mistress is undeniable since Buchanan's exuberant wealth was the subject of their attraction. The sole genuinely magnanimous rich character, Jay Gatsby, is delusional and dependent on illegal means to maintain his lavish lifestyle.

Although written nearly a century later, Yancy's op-ed examines the same theme of reality contradicting American ideals. Ever since the Declaration of Independence affirmed equality for all men and the United States emerged as the land of liberty, the nation claimed to be a republic of moral justice and equality. Yet on January 11, President Donald J. Trump revealed the contradictory truth when he made a racist and derogatory statement condemning immigrants from several nonwhite countries. The representative of the United States allegedly using "shithole" to describe the homelands of foreign immigrants is contemptuous and clearly inconsistent with America's image of acceptance and tolerance.

In "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald warns readers against accepting society at face value, a lesson that Yancy emphasizes as well. To learn from the misplaced optimism of Nick Carraway, Americans today must remain unaffected by the country's idealistic rhetoric of freedom and equality to speak out against our president's bigotry, rather than silently accepting the unjust reality of racism.

Katherine LoBue, 16, Mamaroneck High School: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain and " The Other Inconvenient Truth "

Mark Twain was friends with abolitionist Frederick Douglass, yet he permitted grotesque drawings of escaped slave Jim in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Twain was a benefactor for African American students, yet he depicted Jim as helpless and inferior in the "anti-slavery" satire. Twain clearly had conflicting views regarding African Americans. In his New York Times op-ed, "The Other Inconvenient Truth," author Charles Blow states, "Just because one abhors violence and cruelty doesn't mean that one truly believes that all people are equal... Entertaining the notion of imbalance-that white people are inherently better than others in any way- is also white supremacy." Blow invents the term "soft white supremacy" to describe these beliefs. This concept offered me a way to navigate Twain's puzzling attitudes towards African Americans in Huck Finn.

When reading Twain's classic with my AP English class, I was confused as to why the text wasn't resolutely anti-slavery. In the novel, protagonist Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi to escape their lives in St. Petersburg, Missouri. It takes over 300 pages for Huck to realize Jim is a human being, and even then Huck infantilizes Jim by offering the grown man "help." In the book's last ten controversial chapters, Jim becomes subservient to Huck and Tom, refusing to stand up for himself even when made to complete ridiculous tasks. Jim's behavior in these chapters led me to suspect Twain believed slaves were too unintelligent and submissive to stand up to adolescents. Although Twain depicted Jim as a true human being, giving this book its "anti-slavery" reputation, subtleties in Huck's and Jim's attitudes make me wonder if Twain "entertained notions of imbalance" even though he didn't openly show it.

Most importantly, Blow showed me that "soft white supremacy" still plagues our current times, most notably in the executive branch of our government. In 2011, Trump said President Obama needed to show his birth certificate to prove he was American-born. When announcing his Presidential candidacy, Trump stated Mexicans were drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. Trump said of the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville that violence had taken place "on many sides." No, he didn't openly support the supremacists, but yes, he didn't really condemn them either. Recently, Trump called Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas," actively belittling her and Native Americans simultaneously.

I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Blow speak on January 7th and his words continued to enlighten my understanding of white supremacy. Passive white supremacy, he said, is more deadly than open white supremacy because these feelings can increase exponentially when sparked. Those who turn a blind eye to hateful events are the ones who allow extremism to grow.

I was disappointed that in the end of Twain's novel, Huck knows his Southern society has the wrong views about slavery yet he decides to turn his own blind eye. Huck's choice to escape to the West and ignore these issues on the final page is symbolic of the actions many in our country take today.

Ayden Nichol, 17, Concord-Carlisle Regional High School: "The Merchant of Venice" and " Louisiana's Big Step on Justice Reform "

It can be a terrifying thing to see decades of the pent-up rage of an oppressed person finally let out against their oppressor. This is the case in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," when the Jewish moneylender Shylock brings his nemesis and lifelong tormentor, the Christian merchant Antonio, to court over an unpaid loan. The punishment, as agreed upon between the two men as a condition of the deal, is that Shylock may remove a pound of Antonio's flesh. But before Shylock exacts this cruel retribution, a friend of Antonio's makes a fascinating appeal in his favor. Portia claims that the true sign of strength is not the ability to take revenge, but to show mercy. Mercy, she says, "blesseth him that gives, and him that takes ... 'tis mightiest in the mightiest" (Shakespeare IV.i.183-84). In June of 2017, half a millennium after Shakespeare's fictional court case, the Louisiana state legislature seemed to realize the same thing as Portia when they passed a series of unexpected but widespread criminal justice reform laws which aim to dramatically reduce the prison population and lower recidivism rates. Both instances show that the ability to have mercy gives the person in power an unparalleled opportunity to do good, and ultimately, to benefit themselves.

At its surface, the Louisiana reform package could appear purely as an act of mercy: an attempt to help those who have fallen victim to the state's brutal justice system. On some level, this is all it is; surely there were legislators for whom this was their sole motivation. But whether intended or not, Louisiana stands to receive enormous gains from this package - it truly is "twice blest." As well as expanded parole and prison alternatives, which aim to help those convicted, the state expects to see an improvement in public safety and save over $180 million. The monetary benefits from this merciful outreach will help the state in ways that would never be thought of as connected to improving an inmate's life.

However, conservative politicians, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fail to see this link. They maintain that the best way to keep law and order among their constituents is to wield their power like a sword, striking down any who violate that peace. But Portia reminds us that mercy is what makes a ruler truly powerful; she calls it "an attribute to God himself" (Shakespeare IV.i.190). Sessions and others must reject this easy show of power by way of force and cruelty in the justice system, choosing instead a path that will benefit disadvantaged citizens and show the people that they are worthy of the power we grant them. In this time of political distrust, the American people could use an indication that our politicians are capable of the "awe and majesty" that Portia speaks of (Shakespeare IV.i.186). I am certain that if they chose to show mercy, we would know beyond a doubt that they are worthy of leading us.

Isabella Picillo, 17, Oceanside High School: "The Scarlet Letter" and " Judge Partially Lifts Trump Administration Ban on Refugees "

I stumble upon a New York Times article, "Judge Partially Lifts Trump Administration Ban on Refugees," that makes me wonder if Hawthorne, the literary genius, is wrong.

The article explains a recent case in which a judge, James Robart, lifted a Trump administration ban after hearing a compelling argument that Muslim refugees struggle to reunite with family members who have already legally settled in the U.S. due to discriminatory policies of the U.S. refugee program. Governmental lawyers counter-argued that the ban was necessary because it was in interests of national security.

I sit at the breakfast table wondering if xenophobia was always that pronounced in the United States. It appears to me that xenophobia underlined the governmental lawyers' arguments; an attorney called the ban "reasonable and appropriate." I do not understand how a ban that targets certain groups, specifically Muslims, can be "reasonable." I ask my father, who grew up in an Italian immigrant household if he recalls facing immense oppression. He says no. I often hear people casually declaring that Muslims should not be allowed in the U.S. because they will bomb our cities. When did Muslim refugees become synonymous with terrorism? The answer: recently. How may you ask? The death of our shadows.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" explores the concept of the shadow-self. The character Pearl is praised because she possesses no shadow. Hawthorne suggested that our world would be a better place if we did not have shadows, meaning our dark parts would be exposed to society. We live in Hawthorne's world, and it is not one of sublime beauty, rather it is one of chaos and disgust.

With recent changes in administration, more people have become comfortable vocalizing xenophobic, along with homophobic, racist, and sexist, thoughts. It has become more common to witness politicians share their dark, most discriminatory, comments to gain support. Those thoughts are normalized, causing the death of our shadows.

Shadows barricade impertinent comments and prevent xenophobia from manifesting itself into discriminatory policies like the ban seen in the New York Times article. Although Judge James Robart partially lifted the ban, part of it still exists, along with other similar policies. He's combating xenophobia, while others do little to eradicate discriminatory policies. By doing nothing, a shadow-less world exists. Perhaps if we had shadows, a ban would not exist to prevent Muslim families from reuniting. A Muslim father can watch his daughter blow out the candles on her birthday cake, and a Muslim mother can applaud when her son receives his high school diploma. But they can't.

Hawthorne is wrong. His envisioned world has its perils. It allows xenophobia to persist, causing the unjust discrimination of certain groups like the Muslim refugees mentioned in the article "Judge Partially Lifts Trump Administration Ban on Refugees." We can live again in Hawthorne's imperfect world, where shadows exist, even finding it to be not so imperfect. A shadow can only exist with light; there is no light in a shadow-less world.

Sayali Shelke, 19, Texas A&M University: Stereotype threat and " Careers for Women in Technology Companies Are a Global Challenge "

In the New York Times article, "Careers for Women in Technology Companies Are A Global Challenge," writer Alina Tugend discusses the similarities and differences for women around the world working in the tech field. Tech companies in the United States suffer from a male-dominated, "bro" culture that gives a cold shoulder to female coworkers. In other places, such as the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, the problem lies with class differences, leading to the alienation of middle-class and poor women. The article sums that, while the execution of these issues vary around the world, the underlying effect is still the same: women have a much harder time entering and remaining in the tech field.

The lack of female representation in STEM is not new. While there are many factors that lead to this problem, the one with the deepest consequence is negative stereotypes planted at a young age.

In psychology, we learned about the idea of stereotype threat: a phenomenon in which people are reminded of negative stereotypes of a group they belong to and hence perform on given tasks conforming to those stereotypes. In 1997, researcher Steven Spencer applied this idea to classrooms and discovered that equally intelligent women performed worse on a math exam than their male counterparts after being told that the test showed gender differences. This characterization evoked the negative stereotype of women's lack of math skills and led them to under-perform on the exam. In contrast, he found that if, before the test, participants were led to believe that both parties performed equally, women's scores were similar to the men's. Additional research post Spencer's experiment has further supported this idea, proving that negative stereotypes in gender as well as race and ethnicity reduces the performance of individuals.

This institutionalized idea that women are not as capable of performing mathematical or technical tasks as well as men is deeply rooted in our culture, starting in elementary schools all the way to professional work settings. Learning about stereotype threat was eye-opening because it allowed me to see the deeper effects of the way we teach children about careers and how it differs in males and females. Dr. Spencer's experiment involved one math exam; however, the negative stereotypes about women's lack of technical skills are prevalent universally. The most corrosive part of this narrative is that men are lead to believe these same ideas, so in the future they are equally as unwelcoming of women, a disheartening reality reflected in our companies today.

It is vital that we start debasing these myths and start encouraging women from young ages to be open about any career. Most importantly, we need to teach both men and women such values, so that men can also live in a world where the idea of women being empowered to work in any field is a standard, a world in which creativity and innovation need no gender classification.

Runners-Up

"Wonder Woman," directed by Patty Jenkins, is Hollywood's first classic, female-led, big-budget superhero movie in 12 years. One student compared the movie to "Beowulf," saying both were classic "hero's journey" tales. Credit Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures

Update, Feb. 27: Several readers have asked to learn more about the connections students made, so we've added a short excerpt from the work of each runner-up.

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Andrea B., 17, St. Ignatius College Prep: "Beowulf" and "'Wonder Woman' Could Be the Superhero Women in Hollywood Need"

Whether heroes take the form of a mighty Anglo-Saxon warrior or a fierce Amazonian princess, the people who rise up to lead us out of the shadows of death are cultivated by the trials they face and the hope for a brighter future that we project upon them which are often rooted in the injustices we experience.

Sofie Brutsaert, 15, Jamesville-DeWitt High School: The Stanford Prison Experiment and " ESPN Fires Donovan McNabb and Eric Davis After Lawsuit "

A lot can be learned from the prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Despite the fact that they were innocent, not actual prisoners deserving of punishment, as the simulation progressed they increasingly accepted their abuse without protest. Of course while there are many factors contributing to the silence of sexual assault victims (social pressure, and the fear of losing their jobs among them), it is also true that many of these factors stem from the victim's powerless role, which is similar to the silence of the prisoners in Zimbardo's experiment. While the issue of sexual misconduct is complex and it is impossible to pinpoint any one cause, the findings of the SPE shed a startling light on the effect power has on both the victims and perpetrators of such a widespread epidemic.

Sharanya Datta, 14, Biotechnology High School: "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller and " 'Fake News': Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests "

In the world we live in, fake news is becoming a threat to credibility. With the assistance of the Internet, no one can be completely sure what they are reading is accurate...During the Salem Witch trials in which The Crucible took place, news of witchcraft had spread like ivy. Accusations against Goody Proctor and Rebecca Nurse were the talk of the town not only in Salem, but also in neighboring towns. However, in the 1600's, people were not very educated and did not have much sense of the world; the majority of the townspeople of Salem and the neighboring towns believed everything they heard about witchcraft.

Ian Derushia, 15, Hoggard High School: Genghis Khan and " What Experts Know About Men Who Rape "

Over the course of recent weeks, my AP World class has been conducting a mock trial to try Genghis Khan for being an uncivilized tyrant... As I did more research, not only for the trial but for a more personal understanding, I came across a New York Times article titled "What Experts Know About Men Who Rape" which went on to describe a study that took place to understand the science and psychology behind men that raped...Much like Genghis Khan, these men wanted power, especially if their sexual offenses were violent or aggressive. I believe that Genghis Khan was on a power trip and violated these poor innocent women to demean their societies and to show that he had enough power to do so.

Kendall Dunn, 18, New Tech High @ Coppell: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and " My Year of No Shopping "

In the day and age of wealth, where consumerism is ubiquitous, it's become acceptable to compulsively fill desires through material gains, such as new clothes or electronics. After all, if we have the capability to harmlessly buy whatever we desire, then what's wrong with instant satisfaction?The problem is that we constantly reward ourselves, which in turn causes us to feel less grateful for items we receive. Just like the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we seek products to provide short bursts of satisfaction and often ignore more wholesome alternatives. Similar to the imaginary civilians in Brave New World, we are surrounded by consumables that are marketed for being quick: Amazon Prime, faster internet, minute-microwave rice, etc. Even subpar TV dinner can seem more attractive than a home cooked meal because of its immediate nature. However, better things come to those who wait.

Jackson Edwards, Wesley Gow, Jack Trent, Jaya Krishnan, 17, St. John's School: "Invisible Man" and " A Rebel, a Warrior and a Race Fiend "

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's bildungsroman centered around an unnamed black protagonist (written to be symbolic of any black man), should not be relevant today. Ideally, Invisible Man should serve as a dated reminder of America's dark racial history; unfortunately, its underlying themes remain just as prevalent in today's world as they were when Ellison first released the novel 66 years ago. Charles M. Blow's Op-Ed "A Rebel, a Warrior and a Race Fiend" particularly highlights the similarities between the nameless protagonist's struggles and the deeply-embedded racism that still plagues modern America. Blow uses the racially-charged language of President Donald Trump towards black professional athletes to make a broader point about the "racial inequities fused to the DNA of power in this country." The similarities drawn between Ellison's work, written in an overtly racist America, and Blow's contemporary opinion piece convey a depressing message regarding the glacial rate of social progress.

Sera Eviner, 16, Oceanside High School: Newton's Laws and " The #MeToo Moment: No Longer Complicit "

Why is this [#MeToo] happening now? Why are all of these women all of a sudden sharing their stories? These questions seem to puzzle many, yet there is a simple answer: Newton's first two laws of motion can easily explain the growth of the #MeToo movement. Newton's first law states that an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force...While the initial force is debatable - whether it be President Trump's locker room talk, the growing women's rights movement, or simply women banding together against Harvey Weinstein - it is evident that a strong force had pushed this moment into action. The once silenced women now gained courage and support to speak up; this cause which was once at rest, is now in motion and will remain in motion.

Shane George, 15, New Milford High School: "Othello" by William Shakespeare and " Harvey Weinstein Expelled From Television Academy Over Abuse Claims "

The unequal power dynamic that can exist between the oftentime male offender and female victim in these situations has been a pattern that has existed for generations, going as far back as Shakespearean times. This discussion of male power exerted over women plays out in Othello as we watch high-ranking, socially-influential men manipulate this power dynamic in their favor. As we see the mistakes of Venetian society, we remember our own as well.

Jeong-In Ha, 16, Bergen County Academies: "Troilus and Cressida" by William Shakespeare and " Japan Balks at Calls for New Apology to South Korea Over 'Comfort Women '"

My junior year lit class focused on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the explicit objectification of women present throughout the play. The romance between idealistic Troilus and rational Cressida abruptly ends when Cressida is sold off forcefully to the enemy troop. In the fourth act however, the Greek soldiers welcome Cressida to the camp by doting her with compliments and kisses. The soldiers refer to her as "my fair lady" and "sweet lady", neglecting the fact that they had ripped her out of her home and relationship against her will. This polite diction makes readers believe that Cressida is enjoying her time at the Greek camp, and we oversee the emotional torture she was forced to endure.

Similar to Shakespeare's play, the reference to the sex slaves as "comfort women" and "halmonies" impose a positive connotation on a subject that dare not be taken lightly, as we sometimes come to disregard the injustices these women endured.

Betsy Jenifer, 18, Women's Christian College: "Doctor Faustus" by Christopher Marlowe and " You'll Never Be Famous - And That's O.K. "

Considering that this play was written in the sixteenth century, during the Renaissance period, it is surprising and even baffling, that it is more relevant now than ever before. Today, everybody wants to be famous. Everyone wants to be noticed, loved and desired by everyone else. They want to raise eyebrows and swivel heads the moment they walk into a room and be important enough to make people stop chewing their food at the mention of their name.

In Christopher Marlowe's play, Faustus' unbridled ambitions tragically lead to his downfall. After twenty-four years of enjoying all worldly pleasures, Lucifer along with his armada of devils drag Faustus into Hell for eternity as he cries out gut-wrenchingly.

Victoria Li, 16, Livingston High School: "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and " The Heartbeat of Racism Is Denial "

Sinking into pillows with a pair of fuzzy socks hugging my feet and the delicious aroma of cacao permeating the air, I lost myself in the world of "The Great Gatsby." Beyond the ball gowns and fancy cars, a sense of déjà vu washed over me, and it wasn't due to the fact that I spent most of winter break in a similar position: curled up in bed, sipping hot chocolate. The real explanation was much less pleasant, as I realized that the same issues F. Scott Fitzgerald was commenting on in 1925 still exist today. We live in a society suffering from a severe lack of authenticity. There is no substance beneath our shiny exterior of purported principles. Maybe some of our historical documents provide a gilded barrier between what we say we represent and what we actually are. The article "The Heartbeat of Racism is Denial" addresses this disparity between our stated beliefs and the reality of our condition.

Zoe Maisel, 17, South Forsyth High School: "The History Teacher" by Billy Collins and "'To Kill a Mockingbird' Removed From School in Mississippi "

This poem describes a teacher who largely downplays the brutal and gruesome truths within history and even changes some history in order to protect the children's innocence. He describes the Ice Age as "The Chilly Age" (3) and teaches that the "Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan" (12-13). This seems harmless and appears to keep the children happy and in a world of white picket fences, but the children in the poem are later on the playground "tormenting the weak and the smart" (15-16). The teacher's simplistic and inaccurate accounts of history is producing adverse effects on the children- information that is necessary for their educational growth and development has been kept from them, thus breeding ignorance, hatred, and violence.

This same phenomenon is happening in current times as books are being banned from schools. This is a robbery of information, as most books that are banned include great lessons for children about the world and themselves.

Emily Pinheiro, 16, Arlington High School: Foreign-language study in school and " Thousands Once Spoke His Language in the Amazon. Now, He's the Only One. "

In Intuto, Peru, Amadeo García García is the last man to speak the language of Taushiro, a language dating back centuries from the jungles of the Amazon. He hasn't had anyone to speak the language with, and it is highly likely that the language and culture will die with him. The last person Amadeo has spoken with in his native language was his brother, Juan, who died, along with his parents and others in his village, due to diseases such as malaria. Now that he is the last one, there is pressure on Amadeo to retain his culture and language.

...Learning a foreign language and learning the culture of another country will always have tremendous benefit, in all aspects of life and careers. We should never force someone to be in the position Amadeo is now in; we should work to maintain cultural diversity in order to benefit society and future generations.

Izi Potter, 18, University of Oregon: "The Blank Page" by Karen Blixen and " My Worst Columns "

At the end of stories with important messages, there is a silence that speaks. Danish writer Karen Blixen's short story, The Blank Page, teaches this profound lesson. An old woman relays the advice her grandmother gave when teaching how to tell stories, "Where the storyteller is loyal...there, in the end, silence will speak." ...While in this tale the reluctance to represent every story comes from a place of shame, there are numerous reasons why some stories don't get told.

These days, with access to thousands of news stories at any given moment, people have a nearly endless choice of what narratives to follow. In Nicholas Kristof's article My Worst Columns he writes about his least "clicked on" pieces for the New York Times website. All of his "worst columns" feature stories of injustice or of situations needing humanitarian attention. These are stories with a silence that speaks, but not that many people have ever read them.

...When Americans avoid reading stories that place, as Kristof puts it, "...a spotlight on injustice or humanitarian need," they never get the silence that speaks, and choose instead brash, superficial noise. This is the narrative of 2017 America which focuses on the distracting, at-home crisis of Trump and disregards issues of worldly injustice.

Andrew Reilly, 18, South Forsyth High School: "Tulip Mania" in 17th century Holland and Bitcoin

Bitcoin's price has risen 2000% in 2017; the newfound attention associated with this rise has brought record traffic levels to many cryptocurrency exchanges, many of them buckling under the pressure of thousands of market orders during highly volatile periods of trading. This meteoric and unsustainable rise has drawn many comparisons to famous speculative bubbles throughout history, but the most commonly referenced is the Tulip Mania experienced in 17th century Holland.

...While the comparison between Tulip Mania and Bitcoin may seem reasonable at first, given the unprecedented rise in bitcoin price combined with the hyper-speculative nature of Bitcoin itself, what sets bitcoin apart from the Tulip Bubble is its utility and widespread distribution. Unlike a Tulip a Bitcoin can be fractionalized, making it accessible to common folk even as the price increases. It can also be traded throughout the globe near-instantaneously using the blockchain, an incorruptible cloud based ledger system that records transactions in real time, all while continuously analyzing itself for errors...The comparison between Bitcoin and Tulip Mania is overblown and irresponsible for the press to be touting as it is a poor comparison to the history behind Tulip Mania.

Julia Swicionis, 16, Saint Ignatius College Prep: "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare and " Mueller's Facts and Trump's Make-Believe "

A recent opinion editorial piece titled "Mueller's Facts and Trump's Make-Believe" discusses Donald Trump's contempt for the truth, especially in regards to maintaining his power, and how other political figures are influenced by his words and actions. This piece was written by Roger Cohen, published on December 5, 2017, and gives a general synopsis of the current state of Trump's presidency. However, it conveys the leader of the United States as a delusional, lying, and power driven similar to how Shakespeare conveyed Macbeth in his 17th century drama, Macbeth. The only difference between Cohen's portrayal of Trump and Shakespeare's portrayal of Macbeth is, Macbeth is a fictional character while Trump is actually the President of the United States.

Abby VanLonkhuyzen, 16, Yarmouth High School: The Chinese Exclusion Act and " Trump Bars Refugees and Citizens of 7 Muslim Countries "

The motivations behind the Chinese Exclusion Act and President Trump's executive order are shockingly similar. Both were designed to limit the immigration of one particular ethnic group so those immigrants did not take jobs from the American population. But unlike the Chinese Exclusion Act, the president's executive order faced harsh criticism and was challenged in court on several occasions. It was repealed and replaced with another, less harsh version based on similar principles, which has again been challenged several times in court, eventually making its way up to the Supreme Court .Despite similarities between the two laws, the American people have learned a lot in the last 136 years. We've learned that immigration doesn't hurt the economy - it might even help it. We've learned that, true to American beliefs, the color of a person's skin or the religion they practice does not matter. In a time when increasing diversity and the equality of all people under the law is considered a good thing, Americans are unafraid to speak out for what they believe in and against what they don't.

Honorable Mentions

One of our honorable mentions linked "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Times material from a Learning Network lesson plan on fake news. Credit Illustration by Other Means. Clinton: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Pizza: Jeff Schear/Getty Images.

Avery Crumlish and Isabel Benson, 14, St. Michael's Episcopal School: The geology concept of the rock cycle and " The Best Era for Working Women Was 20 Years Ago "

Nathan Davidov, 17, New Milford High School: "Othello" by William Shakespeare and " 10 Ways to Love Better "

Diego Diaz, 17, Sandra Day O'Connor High School: "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli and " When Elites Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine "

Sawyer Doeg, 13, Asheville Catholic: The Indian Removal Act and " Trump Slashes Size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments "

Odin Doolittle, 16, Concord Carlisle High School: "The Wretched of the Earth" by Franz Fannon and " Rohingya Militants in Myanmar Claim Responsibility for Attack "

Nathanie Doralus, 16, Wekiva High School: "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare and " The Warp-Speed Presidency "

Jeric Duro, 17, New Milford High School: "Othello" by William Shakespeare and " Air Force General Addresses Racial Slurs on Campus: 'You Should Be Outraged' "

* O ur on-demand webinar, "Ripped From the Headlines and Applied to the Classics: Pairing Often-Taught Literary and History Texts With Times Articles and Multimedia," which explores more ideas for helping students make connections like these.

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Thank you, as always, to the teachers and students who took the time to participate. Teachers, if you're interested, please let us know how you used the challenge in your class by writing to LNFeedback@nytimes.com Thank you also to our judges, who included Learning Network staff Shannon Doyne, Caroline Gilpin, Michael Gonchar and Natalie Proulx, as well as teacher-contributors to our site, Amanda Christy Brown and Annissa Hambouz.

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Making Connections: 50 Teenagers Suggest Creative Ways to Link Classic Texts to the World Today

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Contests The Learning Network runs challenges for teenagers all year long, but when we announce a new one, it's always with trepidation. Will it be too hard? Have we been clear enough about what we're looking for? Will anyone out there actually take the time to do it?

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What is Sports Literacy?

Welcome to my sports literacy blog. Here you will find resources for educators as well as sports-related young adult literature for middle and high school students. While many of these texts come from recommended lists from public libraries across the country, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN), and respected educators, librarians, and authors, I cannot personally vouch for every text/resource on this list. Instead, my goal has been to provide relevant options for individuals interested in various aspects of sports literacy. My hope is that teachers and students alike will make informed decisions on the texts they read and the resources they utilize.

Why Sports Literacy?

As Chris Crowe (2001) once noted, "Americans love sports, and we're predisposed to like movies, stories, and books that deal with sports in interesting or creative ways. Sports culture permeates almost every aspect of contemporary society" (p. 129). Thus, as a sports lover myself, I can think of no better way to engage students in reading than by connecting literature to one of the most popular extracurricular interests of middle and high school students across the country. For more information, check out my co-edited book Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports.

Sports and Young Adult Literature

Inevitably, the best of these novels offer well-developed characters facing common experiences and challenges pertinent to teen readers with sports merely providing the hook, backdrop, and/or setting. In the words of David Gorlewski, co-editor of English Journal, "Sports, like any social endeavor, can provide a prism through which to view human nature and explore the experiences of young adults." My hope is that the stories and resources found on this blog might prove useful for teachers and students in just this manner.

I have tried to incorporate as great a variety of texts/genres as possible to meet the needs of secondary students of various ages, backgrounds, and genders, as well as students with diverse reading levels and extracurricular interests. To do so, I have pulled from authors both past and present and from resources old and new. I am constantly updating the site, so check back often.

Please note that all grade levels listed by individual texts are based on Amazon reviews from sources such as School Library Journal, BookList, etc. They do not necessarily represent my view of grade level appropriateness and should be considered with caution.

Sports Literacy Publications

For more information on examining sports and culture in the English classroom, take a look at this 2014 themed issue of English Journal as well as this list of recommended resources. If you are more interested in sports and young adult literature, pick up a copy of the spring/summer 2016 issue of SIGNAL Journal, including my article "Young Adult [Sports] Literature: Looking Back and Moving Forward" or check out this NCTE blog post.

To hear more about our edited book, Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports, check out this interview with Education Talk Radio or the other resources located on the sports literacy announcements page.

For more, follow me on Twitter at Alando1423. If you would like to suggest other resources/texts, please contact me by email at any time.
To find a list of texts for each sport, click on the tabs to the left (e.g., basketball) and then click the archived link under the same heading.

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Welcome to my sports literacy blog. Here you will find resources for educators as well as sports-related young adult literature for middle and high school students. While many of these texts come from recommended lists from public libraries across the country, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN), and respected educators, librarians, and authors, I...

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What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? Saying to students, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes! No safety net, no parachute-they're just left to their own devices.

Let's start by agreeing that scaffolding a lesson and differentiating instruction are two different things. Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk. When scaffolding reading, for example, you might preview the text and discuss key vocabulary, or chunk the text and then read and discuss as you go. With differentiation, you might give a child an entirely different piece of text to read, or shorten the text or alter it, or modify the writing assignment that follows.

Simply put, scaffolding is what you do first with kids. For those students who are still struggling, you may need to differentiate by modifying an assignment or making accommodations like choosing a more accessible text or assigning an alternative project.

Scaffolding and differentiation do have something in common, though. In order to meet students where they are and appropriately scaffold a lesson or differentiate instruction, you have to know the individual and collective zone of proximal development (ZPD) of your learners. Education researcher Eileen Raymond says, "The ZPD is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance."

So let's get to some scaffolding strategies you may or may not have tried yet. Or perhaps you've not used them in some time and need a gentle reminder on how awesome and helpful they can be when it comes to student learning.

1. Show and Tell

How many of us say that we learn best by seeing something rather than hearing about it? Modeling for students is a cornerstone of scaffolding, in my experience. Have you ever interrupted someone with "Just show me!" while they were in the middle of explaining how to do something? Every chance you have, show or demonstrate to students exactly what they are expected to do.

Try a fishbowl activity, where a small group in the center is circled by the rest of the class; the group in the middle, or fishbowl, engages in an activity, modeling how it's done for the larger group.

Always show students the outcome or product before they do it. If a teacher assigns a persuasive essay or inquiry-based science project, a model should be presented side-by-side with a criteria chart or rubric. You can guide students through each step of the process with the model of the finished product in hand.

Use think alouds, which will allow you to model your thought process as you read a text, solve a problem, or design a project. Remember that children's cognitive abilities are still in development, so opportunities for them to see developed, critical thinking are essential.

2. Tap Into Prior Knowledge

Ask students to share their own experiences, hunches, and ideas about the content or concept of study and have them relate and connect it to their own lives. Sometimes you may have to offer hints and suggestions, leading them to the connections a bit, but once they get there, they will grasp the content as their own.

Launching the learning in your classroom from the prior knowledge of your students and using this as a framework for future lessons is not only a scaffolding technique-many would agree it's just plain good teaching.

3. Give Time to Talk

All learners need time to process new ideas and information. They also need time to verbally make sense of and articulate their learning with the community of learners who are engaged in the same experience and journey. As we all know, structured discussions really work best with children regardless of their level of maturation.

If you aren't weaving in think-pair-share, turn-and-talk, triad teams, or some other structured talking time throughout the lesson, you should begin including this crucial strategy on a regular basis.

4. Pre-Teach Vocabulary

Sometimes referred to as front-loading vocabulary, this is a strategy that we teachers don't use enough. Many of us, myself included, are guilty of sending students all alone down the bumpy, muddy path known as Challenging Text-a road booby-trapped with difficult vocabulary. We send them ill-prepared and then are often shocked when they lose interest, create a ruckus, or fall asleep.

Pre-teaching vocabulary doesn't mean pulling a dozen words from the chapter and having kids look up definitions and write them out-we all know how that will go. Instead, introduce the words to kids in photos or in context with things they know and are interested in. Use analogies and metaphors, and invite students to create a symbol or drawing for each word. Give time for small-group and whole-class discussion of the words. Not until they've done all this should the dictionaries come out. And the dictionaries will be used only to compare with those definitions they've already discovered on their own.

With the dozen or so words front-loaded, students are ready, with you as their guide, to tackle that challenging text.

5. Use Visual Aids

Graphic organizers, pictures, and charts can all serve as scaffolding tools. Graphic organizers are very specific in that they help kids visually represent their ideas, organize information, and grasp concepts such as sequencing and cause and effect.

A graphic organizer shouldn't be The Product but rather a scaffolding tool that helps guide and shape students' thinking. Some students can dive right into discussing, or writing an essay, or synthesizing several different hypotheses, without using a graphic organizer of some sort, but many of our students benefit from using one with a difficult reading or challenging new information. Think of graphic organizers as training wheels-they're temporary and meant to be removed.

6. Pause, Ask Questions, Pause, Review

This is a wonderful way to check for understanding while students read a chunk of difficult text or learn a new concept or content. Here's how this strategy works: Share a new idea from discussion or the reading, then pause (providing think time), and then ask a strategic question, pausing again.

You need to design the questions ahead of time, making sure they're specific, guiding, and open-ended. (Even great questions fail if we don't give think time for responses, so hold out during that Uncomfortable Silence.) Keep kids engaged as active listeners by calling on someone to give the gist of what was just discussed, discovered, or questioned. If the class seems stuck on the questions, provide an opportunity for students to discuss in pairs.

With all the diverse learners in our classrooms, there is a strong need for teachers to learn and experiment with new scaffolding strategies. I often say to teachers I support that they have to slow down in order to go quickly. Scaffolding a lesson may, in fact, mean that it takes longer to teach, but the end product is of far greater quality and the experience much more rewarding for all involved.

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? Saying to students, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes! No safety net, no parachute-they're just left to their own devices. Let's start by agreeing that scaffolding a lesson and differentiating instruction are two different things.

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Book Review of The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

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Book Review of The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

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The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni is one of the best books I have read this year. Wonderful male protagonist.

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Quite a departure from Dugoni's dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite ( The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.

Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed "the devil boy" by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school's principal and Freemon's enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone-the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian-represents new challenges. Even Sam's graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn't rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother's unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.

Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps "too episodic," his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.

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THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF SAM HELL by Robert Dugoni | Kirkus Reviews

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Quite a departure from Dugoni's dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite ( The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes. Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red.

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Interesting article on code-switching related to new movie Sorry to Bother You.

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In high school, a friend told En Low that she used a "white girl voice" during a class presentation. The observation took Low, the daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants, by surprise - it was the same bubbly voice she used while taking phone orders at her parents' carryout restaurant in Northern Virginia, and that she would again adopt a few years later while working at a call center for the University of Pennsylvania.

"I had done it since I was really young," said Low, now 20. "This was just what you were supposed to do."

Code-switching, or altering the way you speak based on the audience, is a widespread phenomenon among those whose accents and dialects stray from the national standard, long considered in the United States to be the language patterns of the Midwest. A Southerner working as a news anchor in the North might avoid using elongated vowels. A Latina might ditch the Spanglish slang she uses with friends while interacting with white co-workers. After a scolding, an African American child might refrain from speaking in vernacular English at school.

Unconsciously or not, people code-switch to present what they believe (or are told) is a more favorable version of themselves - an instinct often heightened when interactions are conducted over the phone, as is the case in the new movie " Sorry to Bother You." Boots Riley's absurdist flick centers on Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), a black telemarketer in Oakland, Calif., who discovers that the secret to professional success is talking to potential customers in his "white voice," or one dubbed here by an extra-nasal David Cross. It's like when you're pulled over by the police, his wise co-worker Langston (Danny Glover) tells him.
[Is Hollywood ready for the brilliant weirdness of Lakeith Stanfield?]
The comment is in line with the movie's biting satire, which raises a larger question about the telecommunications industry: People already hate getting calls from these strangers, whose jobs rely on coming off as trustworthy while still being persuasive. How does one deal with linguistic bias on top of an already difficult juggling act?

"It's stressful," said Lariese Reeves, 45, who works in an auto-financing firm's customer service department. For whatever reason, customers who call sometimes exhibit a great deal of animosity. She referred to her job as an "adult day care" because she must put up with verbal abuse daily - whether the fault is her department's or not - and soothe angry customers by using an upbeat tone.

Reeves isn't entirely sure what "upbeat" means in this context but knows it is a word her bosses consistently use in evaluating her performance. Santander, the finance company, uses a speech analytics software called CallMiner that grades employees based on their diction and word choice. Reeves, a longtime Texas resident with a "country accent," has a tough time with it. She says the right words, but CallMiner can't always detect them - meanwhile, her bonus has dropped from about $600 each month to just $92.

"It's very stressful," Reeves said, "to have your job on the line for an automated system."

In a sense, CallMiner is a mechanized version of the linguistic profiling that sociolinguist and current Washington University in St. Louis professor John Baugh studied after he experienced discrimination during a housing search in the late 1980s. He found that Bay Area landlords who invited him over the phone to view apartments would often express surprise that he is black when he arrived: "Oh, there must be some mistake," they would say.

So Baugh conducted an experiment in which he made calls to the same landlords using African American, Mexican American and "standard American" dialects. The results, published in 1999, found a significant difference in the number of appointments granted to the "callers" with minority dialects and confirmed that racism can extend to phone conversations.

This concept also plays a part in another summer movie: director Spike Lee's upcoming dramedy " BlacKkKlansman," set in the early 1970s. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first black detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department and, determined to prove himself, leads a sting operation against the Ku Klux Klan. He puts the theory behind Baugh's experiment to an extreme test by "joining" the KKK over the phone, posing as a white man while speaking to local chapter leader Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold) and even David Duke (Topher Grace) using "King's English."

Stallworth can instantly switch between dialects, something many people of color might find familiar. Shereen Marisol Meraji grew up in Sacramento with an Iranian father and Puerto Rican mother, whose family they lived near. Meraji, now 40, would speak English to her parents and Spanish to her grandparents - sometimes within a single conversation - which, coupled with hanging out with mostly Latinos in college, contributed to a Spanglish-infused vocabulary.

Meraji began to work as a production assistant at NPR in the early 2000s, which she recently described as a "huge shock to the system" despite her liberal arts education. Her co-workers used the adjective "uber" regularly. They spoke in references to the Economist and the New Yorker. They were overwhelmingly white.

"I need to be able to speak the language these people are speaking in because my ideas are going nowhere," Meraji thought at the time. "I learned how to code-switch into NPRese."

She eventually did, and when she landed 2½ minutes of airtime to talk about hip-hop legend Nate Dogg on "All Things Considered," she was so excited about the segment that she posted it on Facebook. A friend messaged her privately: "I didn't want to put this on Facebook, but what's up with that white voice?"

"It really occurred to me that something was going on inside my subconscious mind," Meraji said. "It's this deliberate thing NPR people do. They pronounce everything very deliberately, and it's slower than I would normally talk."

Meraji now co-hosts the popular podcast " Code Switch." Though she works in radio and didn't deal with the irritated recipients of telemarketing calls, her experience would probably resonate with those who mimic higher-ups or call to mind politicians who adopt the vernacular of their audience.

The University of Pennsylvania is a predominantly white institution, En Low pointed out, so she code-switches from her regular way of speaking - which she has been told by peers sounds "not really educated" and "really slang heavy" - into a softer tone unless surrounded by close friends. It took some effort at the call center, even more so with the pressure applied by a supervisor who would closely monitor calls and criticize employees if they didn't get people to donate enough money to the Ivy League school. After just three weeks, it got to be too much.

"It was weird to be aggressive in a code-switched voice," Low said. "So I quit."
Correction: An earlier version of this article said En Low's parents were Malaysian immigrants. They are Malaysian Chinese. The story has been updated.

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'What's up with that white voice?': The tricky art of linguistic code-switching

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In high school, a friend told En Low that she used a "white girl voice" during a class presentation. The observation took Low, the daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants, by surprise - it was the same bubbly voice she used while taking phone orders at her parents' carryout restaurant in Northern Virginia, and that she would again adopt a few years later while working at a call center for the University of Pennsylvania.

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Alexander reads from his book Rebound.  Check out his other works, Booked, Crossover, and He Said, She Said at his website https://kwamealexander.com/ or on Amazon.

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Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍  #Rebound 
#PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry

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Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍  #Rebound 
#PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry https://t.co/vNTf9YWhhz

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Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍 #Rebound #PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry pic.twitter.com/vNTf9YWhhz
— Kwame Alexander (@kwamealexander) May 29, 2018

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Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍  #Rebound 
#PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry https://t.co/vNTf9YWhhz

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Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍  #Rebound 
#PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry https://t.co/vNTf9YWhhz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Grab the ball and just keep shooting...🏀📙👍  #Rebound 
#PoemToWelcomeSummer #poetry

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Watch Saturday Night Live highlight 'World War II 101' on NBC.com

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Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)

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Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)

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A Division of the American Library Association

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Over half of today's YA readers are over the age of 18.

Ian Waldie / Reuters

This article is edited from a story shared exclusively with members of The Masthead, the membership program from The Atlantic (find out more). In part one, we explore why adults gravitate towards books written for children and teenagers. In part two, we hear from best-selling YA author John Green about his latest protagonist and the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Young-adult literature typically centers on teenagers. But while the publishing industry markets these books primarily to young adults, that's not always who reads them. Approximately 55 percent of today's YA readers are adults. To find out why, I consulted the president of a young-adult publishing imprint, a professor of young-adult literature, a few Masthead members who love YA, and Green himself. Here's what they said.

1. These books are about coming of age, and we're still coming of age. "What all these YA novels share is a universal coming of age experience," Jennifer Loja, president of Penguin Young Readers, wrote to me in an email. The bildungsroman-the original term for a coming-of-age story-dates back to 17th century Germany, when Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his contemporaries began writing stories about young protagonists, progressing on a journey toward maturity. "To come of age is perhaps the most common ground there could be among readers," said Virginia Zimmerman, professor of English literature at Bucknell University. "Adults recognize it as something they've been through, but they also recognize it as something of a fantasy. It suggests some sort of stable existence. And as adults, we know that we continue to change, continue to come of age."

2. The intensity of the first time. Green said teenage characters give him an opportunity to articulate a completely different kind of emotion. "Teenagers have a reputation for being jaded and cynical, but in fact I find them wondrously lacking in cynicism and wondrously earnest in their un-ironized emotional experience." A lot of that stems, he said, from experiencing everything for the first time. Your first kiss, your first slow dance, your first time driving a car, your first failure. "The first time has an intensity to it that the second time just doesn't have."

3. It's not about the escape. In the world of young-adult academia, Zimmerman says professors often argue that adults read YA fiction to escape. That's probably because so much of young-adult literature overlaps with genre fiction-plot-driven books that fall into one specific genre, like fantasy, romance, or sci-fi. But Zimmerman doesn't buy that argument. "The YA books that have been popular with adults are dark and serious and hard," she said. "People might to go to YA literature to sink into a reality different than their own, but I think they sink into that reality to encounter feelings, challenges, and relationships they recognize from their own lives." That rang true for Masthead member Pamela. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a highly-acclaimed book that tackles race and police brutality through the eyes of 16-year-old Starr Carter, was one of her favorite books of the year. Masthead member Craig says these books teach him what it's like to be a young person today. "YA is just another portal into another aspect of our world."

4. They're good, and they're being recognized. "A good story is a good story," Pamela said, "regardless of the intended audience." Zimmerman agreed. "There are so many more exciting YA books with diverse protagonists now than there used to be," she said. When I asked her how the genre had changed since she started studying it 12 years ago, she said the books had just gotten better. That's likely because, while much of the book industry has suffered, the genre is one of the few that remains profitable. "The New York Times now has a dedicated YA bestsellers list," wrote Loja, who leads one of the country's largest young-adult publishing imprints. "YA franchises are being adapted for film and are perfect for streaming. And we've seen a steep increase in the number of YA submissions and YA publications, year after year."

5. "It all goes back to Harry Potter-because that was popular across the board with every kind of reader you can think of," Zimmerman said. "There are a lot of people who, before Harry Potter, simply never would have considered reading a book written for children." In the United Kingdom, the Harry Potter books were published with two different covers: one for adults, one for kids. That way, Zimmerman said, adults would feel less self-conscious about their reading choices. When it comes to adults reading YA books, Masthead member Bill aptly noted, "Having a wand and an owl helps."

"LANGUAGE ALWAYS COMES UP SHORT IN THE FACE OF PAIN" On Monday, Masthead members participated in an exclusive conference call with author John Green. Listen to the full call below.

Aza Holmes, the protagonist in Green's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, has severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. Throughout the book, she wrestles with what she calls "thought spirals," episodes when destructive thoughts swirl around, one after another, and she can't get out of her head. Green chose to write about these experiences, he told us on Monday, because they mirror his own. "When I get into these thought spirals, it's not that I can't get out of them for a while," Green said. "It's that it feels like I can't get out of it ever, because this thing is going to tighten forever until I die, until it kills me. It's really scary."

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Why So Many Adults Read Young-Adult Literature

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Over half of today's YA readers are over the age of 18. This article is edited from a story shared exclusively with members of The Masthead, the membership program from The Atlantic (find out more). In part one, we explore why adults gravitate towards books written for children and teenagers.

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With a panel of celebrated authors, TIME presents the most compelling, enlightening and influential YA books of all time, dating back to the 1800s

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Classroom Guide for Above the Noise _ Lesson Plans _ KQED Education.pdf

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180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents (Gallagher & Kittle, 2018)

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180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents (Gallagher & Kittle, 2018)

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Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle take readers step-by-step through the year they planned and taught together from opposite coasts.

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Steve Hartman updates his 2014 interview Malcolm Mitchell before the 2017 Super Bowl.  Mitchell promotes reading through his book The Magician's Hat, his Read with Malcolm website, and Share the Magic foundation.

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Penny Kittle shares how she has implemented daily reading in her classes.

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Special Offer: We are dedicated to teachers. Use coupon code TAW23 to receive 30% off the list price and free shipping within the U.S. Valid only on online orders paid by credit card. Restrictions apply.

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Special Offer: We are dedicated to teachers. Use coupon code TAW23 to receive 30% off the list price and free shipping within the U.S. Valid only on online orders paid by credit card. Restrictions apply.

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Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports (Ed. Brown & Rodesiler, 2016)

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Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports (Ed. Brown & Rodesiler, 2016)

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Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports .pdf

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Power Tools for Adolescent Literacy: Strategies for Learning (Rozelle & Scearce, 2008)

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Power Tools for Adolescent Literacy: Strategies for Learning (Rozelle & Scearce, 2008)

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Power Tools for Adolescent Literacy | Solution Tree

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This comprehensive collection of powerful literacy tools and strategies for secondary teachers is based on research from top literacy experts.

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Learning Style Inventory - Sternberg.pdf

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Word Walls: A Support for Literacy in Secondary School Classrooms

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Word Walls: A Support for Literacy in Secondary School Classrooms

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Education World_ Teachers Say Word Walls Work!.pdf

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ELA.L.7.5b

Common core State Standards

ELA:
English Language Arts

L:
Language

7:
7th Grade

5b:
Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.

a. Interpret figures of speech (e.g., literary, biblical, and mythological allusions) in context.
b. Use the relationship between particular words (e.g., synonym/antonym, analogy) to better understand each of the words.
c. Distinguish among the connotations (associations) of words with similar denotations (definitions) (e.g., refined, respectful, polite, diplomatic, condescending).

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

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Thought starters

1. Why is setting a time limit essential to this activity?

2. How can this activity be used as both a pre-teaching and review activity?

3. What are the learning benefits of allowing students to be mobile?

School Details

Wilmette Junior High School
620 Locust Road
Wilmette IL 60091

Data Provided By:

Teachers

English Language Arts / 7 / Teacher

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Jody McCauley uses address labels to spice up the practice of thinking through analogies. Each student has a worksheet with one part of the analogy that they must match up with a word on another classmates back. Ms. McCauley advises using this activity for pre-teaching or review.

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Above the Noise: Cut Through the Hype (KQED, 2018)

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Above the Noise: Cut Through the Hype (KQED, 2018)

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This YouTube series for teens provides videos about thoroughly researched current issues, discussion guides, and other materials that will facilitate deeper thinking, discussion, and writing. See the Classroom Guide under "Handouts & Assorted Documents."

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Above the Noise , a YouTube series for teens, cuts through the hype and dives deep into the research behind the issues affecting their daily lives. The series investigates controversial subject matter to help young viewers draw their own informed conclusions while inspiring media literacy and civic engagement. FOR EDUCATORS: Join us on PBS Learning Media where you'll find standards-aligned free lesson plans, viewing guides, transcripts, and more for each episode. Learn more about ourpartnerships and funders.

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Above the Noise , a YouTube series for teens, cuts through the hype and dives deep into the research behind the issues affecting their daily lives. The series investigates controversial subject matter to help young viewers draw their own informed conclusions while inspiring media literacy and civic engagement.

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One of my favorite websites from my days in the classroom. Famous American speeches, movie speeches, and more. . .

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Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio, and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two.

Index links alphabetized by first name. Available mediums flagged with [T] (text), [A] (audio), [V] (video).

See also a special issue:

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American Rhetoric: The Power of Oratory in the United States

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Site dedicated to Public Rhetoric, political, social, movie and religious speeches and related concepts of and exercises in rhetoric.

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Artful Thinking: Project Zero (Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2018)

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Artful Thinking: Project Zero (Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2018)

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Excellent website from the Harvard Graduate School of Education! Easy to navigate with a plethora a resources and topics that stimulate critical thinking, discussion, and writing.

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Artful Thinking helps teachers use works of visual art and music in ways that strengthen student thinking and learning in the arts and beyond. The goals of this program are to help teachers create connections between works of art and the curriculum, and to help teachers use art as a force for developing students' thinking dispositions. Using the artist's palette as a central metaphor, the Artful Thinking "palette" is comprised of six thinking dispositions which strengthen students' intellectual behaviors. These dispositions are developed through Thinking Routines, which are easy to learn and can deepen students' thinking in the classroom.

Project Info

Funders: Traverse City, Michigan Area Public Schools, US Department of Education

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Artful Thinking helps teachers use works of visual art and music in ways that strengthen student thinking and learning in the arts and beyond. The goals of this program are to help teachers create connections between works of art and the curriculum, and to help teachers use art as a force for developing students' thinking dispositions.

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Too many resources to describe!  Take a look here and under "Videos" up-to-date resources, articles, etc.. at what Jennifer Gonzalez has collected and shared.

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Do You Speak American? (Macneil/Lehrer Productions, 2005)

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Do You Speak American? (Macneil/Lehrer Productions, 2005)

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An interesting study of how our language has evolved. Check out the educator's guide for suggestions and ideas for incorporating within your class.

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Thirteen/WNET New York's Do You Speak American? - featuring celebrated journalist and writer Robert MacNeil in his first public television documentary since 1995 - is a celebration of Americans as seen - and heard - through the way we speak.

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English Companion: Where English Teachers Go to Help Each Other (Burke, 2018)

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English Companion: Where English Teachers Go to Help Each Other (Burke, 2018)

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This is a NING for English teachers to share/post ideas and discuss classroom topics. Jim Burke is a classroom teacher and author of several books on teaching English.

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A curation of famous trials from 399 B.C. to the present.

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"Famous Trials" first appeared on the Web in 1995, making this site older than about 99.96% of all websites. In 2016, the site seemed to be showing its age. So Famous Trials 2.0 (thanks to my great support team) debuts in 2017 with a cleaner look, additional video and audio clips, and new features that should improve navigation around the site.

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Originally featured on ChannelOne, Flocabulary turns vocabulary, concepts, books, and events into concise, entertaining "raps."  A subscription to Flocabulary gives access to lesson plans and activity sheets that are great for introducing or reviewing material.

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Educational Hip-Hop Songs & Videos for All Subjects, K-12

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Flocabulary is a library of songs, videos and activities for K-12 online learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers use Flocabulary’s educational raps and teaching lesson plans to supplement their instruction and engage students. Our team of artists and educators is not only committed to raising test scores, but also to fostering a love of learning in every child.

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Our education programmes are designed to encourage young people to develop new skills in performing arts by creating excitement around words and rhyming to gain a positive experience of Shakespeare, music, literature and the arts as a whole. Interactive sessions are designed to assist in building self-confidence and unlocking creative and artistic abilities with lyric-writing and performing poetic lyrical reinterpretations based on Shakespeare's works, thus providing a platform to showcase creative ideas, supported by leading creative industry professionals. THSC works across primary, secondary schools right up to College/University level to include interactive lecture formats.

THSC's Artist Associates (supported by THSC Peer Leaders) deliver educational workshops and residency programmes to engage with schools, theatres, arts organisations and brands to demonstrate the cultural, social and linguistic parallel's between hip-hop and its many similarities within themes, language and rhythm used by The Bard.

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Our education programmes are designed to encourage young people to develop new skills in performing arts by creating excitement around words and rhyming to gain a positive experience of Shakespeare, music, literature and the arts as a whole.

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Teach and learn with The Times: Resources for bringing the world into your classroom

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By Fran McVeigh

Make no mistake about it. This book, It's All About the Books: How to Create Bookrooms and Classroom Libraries That Inspire Readers , is about making sure that ALL students have access to books. And our #G2Great chat with guest hosts Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan was trending within seven minutes of the opening tweet on April 5th. The pace was fast, furious, filled with the famous (Kylene Beers, Laura Robb, and Penny Kittle to name a few), and packed with powerful learning. As participants, we were given guidance and flexibility through the talented wisdom of Tammy and Clare (and the experts that they base their work on) that would also allow us to insert our own vision and passion to meet the needs of students in our classrooms across the continent. Neither the chat nor the book is about meeting proficiency levels ( although books are the appropriate tool ) or choosing a set list of books ( your student needs will vary ), but were both focused on many critical aspects of developing book collections. This post will focus on just two of them: Access and Design.

What does access to books mean for classroom libraries and bookroom collections?

Every student deserves quality books that he or she can read in order to be a reader. Books are the tools of readers. Access to books cannot be left to chance. That means that within a school building every student needs access to a classroom library and probably some form of a collaborative collection in a bookroom in addition to the school library. When access to books is a priority, every first year teacher will walk into a classroom full of chairs, desks, and tables that also has a classroom library that is fully-stocked. The teachers and administrators understand and believe that when students read a lot - both texts they choose and can read - they will become lifelong readers, and that classroom library is an indicator of the strength of their belief. A final element of access will reflect that the collection will "grow and extend" with the students. The books that are the focus at the end of the year may be totally different from the books that were in the library on opening day. Some books will remain constant but many other books will be replaced as students outgrow themselves as readers and demand different topics and types of books as the school year evolves.
What is the benefit for the students?
Books will be celebrated and students will know that one goal is to build a reader's identity so some books will match the students. They will see themselves in the books and will also be able to see all the other members of their community. Each student will have access to the number of books that they need at school and at home that is necessary for him/her to be an engaged and inspired reader. Students will talk about their books with peers and adults. Students will also have a great deal of choice in what they read as well as when and where they read. Their days will be filled with opportunities to spend extended time reading so that being "lost in a book" is a routine habit. Because we also know that book choice is personal, not every student will want to read the exact same book. Opportunities for choice will need to be encouraged on a regular basis in order to develop and strengthen the habits of readers. Many books will be needed. Tammy and Clare tell us:

"Books are our tools to develop lifelong readers. The only way to merge true choice and accessibility is to have options and lots of them!" (Heinemann, It's All About the Books, p 12)

What is the benefit for the teachers?
Every teacher will have access to books necessary to meet the needs of their students. These books will match the purpose: whole group, small group (guided or strategy), partner, and independent reading as well as instructional needs: Read Alouds, writing mentors, science content and/or social studies content. Access to quality books will enhance instruction and engage and inspire students. Access coupled with equity will mean that classroom collections will no longer be dependent upon teachers personally funding their own classroom libraries.

In order to achieve this access, all teachers will be expected to work collaboratively to identify the existing inventory of books available in the building and then strategically plan for the best use. What does that mean? Perhaps there are six packs of guided reading books that are gathering dust in current guided reading libraries. Maybe they could be better utilized if they were inserted into classroom libraries or set up for book club usage or even independent reading. Specific gaps in types of books that students like and want to read can be addressed systemically after establishing priorities and developing an organized purchasing plan. Teachers with access to a wide range of books will be able to share their own passion, agency, and that sense of inquiry that exists in their own reading lives without the pressure of being personally responsible for provisioning every book the students read.
Selected Tweets about Access:
Why is design important for classroom libraries and bookroom collections?

In the book, the chapter about design begins with a Steve Jobs quote:

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

This means that in order for the books to be effective learning tools, there will need to be many books. Tammy and Clare offer suggestions on how to calculate the number of books that must be available for students at each grade level. Do involve the students in decisions because they will be a part of "how it works." Don't quit because you are discouraged by the staggering number of books needed because, Tammy and Clare also say:

"When teachers share texts and rotate inventory, stocking a school with authentic literature is a very affordable option. It truly is more bang for your books." (p. 83)

#1 Design Issue: What to do with Book Levels

Much has been written about book levels by such literacy giants as Fountas and Pinnell, Donalyn Miller, Kylene Beers, and our own Dr. Mary Howard. I love the phrase "Intent vs. Impact" that Tammy and Clare use in their book and in their podcast. Levels are instructional tools that are intended to be guides - not absolutes and definitely not to limit a student's access to books. ( But wait a minute, access was the last section!) Levels are not going to define a child's reading so levels will not be the ORGANIZER for books which brings us back to design. Some questions to be answered are: How will books be organized? How will they be displayed? Which books?
What is the benefit for students?
Taking book levels off of shelves and baskets does not meant that "anything goes" just as access doesn't mean that students can only read a "Level H" for example. Middle ground means that book baskets can be organized by "concepts or ideas" such as "LOL" and the books in the LOL basket on the top shelf may be A-B, while the books in the LOL basket on the second shelf may be C-D, and the books in the LOL basket on the third shelf may be E-F. Students have access to any of the baskets but when they are choosing books that they can read independently, they can first decide on content: animals, friends, LOL, etc., and then check out the basket on the shelf that they are typically reading from. No one will ever say, "Now, Johnny, what level should you be reading?" Instead the conversation about books will be around the content and the strategies/skills/habits that the student uses as they tackle the books. Book levels will be inside the front cover or on the back cover, but they will not be the FIRST decision when choosing a book.
What is the benefit for teachers?
Teachers will need to know the qualities of the levels, not to define students but to know just which book will be the next "ladder" for instruction, which will be a challenge or stretch, and which will be "just right"? This actually gives the teacher more flexibility because it is easier to drop a level or two for beginning work with a more difficult skill without causing student or parental panic. With practice students can quickly move through appropriate books for the WORK they are engaging in rather than the "But I'm supposed to be reading H books!" that often currently surfaces.

Students can also be active participants in the book organization and the design of the classroom library so this means less work for the teacher. The classroom community can work together to create their own categories as they help curate the collection. Their "work" will also enable them to better appreciate the scope of the classroom collection. I'm always amazed when I'm in a classroom and students from another grade quietly step in, select a book from behind the teacher's desk, and return to their own classroom. It's important to know where those "book floods" exist that students actually have access to when they are in search of their next great book.

Shared teacher design is accomplished with the use of a bookroom or collaborative collection that helps provide the volume, range and choice that matches students' interests. This collection exists to supply access to a world of ideas for students when they need them. Classroom libraries can easily be refreshed or rotated each quarter or each major school break so the teacher has a more ready supply of books available without a run on Amazon, Scholastic or other book sources. Sharing texts and especially series books makes provisioning libraries with authentic literature much more affordable. A five year purchasing plan, prioritized by gaps, can stretch farther than an individual teacher's purchases.
Selected Tweets About Design:
All proceeds from the sale of this book will go #BookLove to fund elementary or middle school classroom libraries as explained in the following two tweets:

Books are the mainstay of student learning. Students gain such a feeling of accomplishment as they name that first book they can read or write. Literacy identities are important. This book, this chat, and the additional resources posted below literally add to our own passion for books, our "book love", Reading is important because it improves our communication skills and enables us to learn about places and people that we may never see. It also helps build vocabulary and writing skills as we communicate better and even become better persons. Books can help us with all of those skills and this book, It's All About the Books, by Tammy and Clare can help us inventory, prioritize and develop a plan to further extend our budgets and ultimately our learning! This book gives you a proven process, with a ten year track record, that will help you maximize your resources for increased student and teacher access and design and organize all those resources in your classrooms and bookrooms.

And if you already have Access and Design under control in your classroom libraries and bookrooms, there are many other chapters that deal with: Why a bookroom? Where to find diverse books? Technology? How are "Texts" defined? What about summer school access? Tammy and Clare will guide you through all the answers!!
Check out these Additional Resources

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By Fran McVeigh Make no mistake about it. This book, It's All About the Books: How to Create Bookrooms and Classroom Libraries That Inspire Readers , is about making sure that ALL students have access to books. And our #G2Great chat with guest hosts Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan was trending within seven minutes of the opening tweet on April 5th.

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Our Take A Number series is exploring problems around the world through the lens of a single number. Today's number is 81, which is how many French schools a journalist visited to teach kids about disinformation on the Internet.
As the bell rings, students file into class at Maxence Van der Meersch middle school. This morning the kids have a visitor - investigative journalist Thomas Huchon.

Without telling them the topic of his visit, Huchon says he's going to show them a mini-documentary.

The video claims that the CIA spread the AIDS virus in Cuba, and says that was the real reason behind the decades-long U.S. embargo. It was only lifted, the narrator says, so American and French pharmaceutical companies could cash in on an AIDS vaccine developed by Cuban doctors.

The students don't yet know it, but Huchon and his colleagues at video news network Spicee created the video themselves, as part of an experiment after the French terrorist attacks in 2015. They noticed how conspiracy theories against the official version of the attacks were spreading on the Internet, and they wanted to do their own experiment.

"So we created a fake story," says Huchon. "We put it on the Web, and what we expected to happen happened: Lots of conspiracy theorist websites picked up on this information and spread it without any kind of verification."

Huchon says that before they removed it, their video had 10,000 hits on YouTube and thousands of shares on Facebook.

Widespread concerns about the inability of many people in France to tell a real news story from a fake one have led this French journalist to visit 81 schools since 2016, on a mission to teach kids about fake news and disinformation.

In this classroom, in the seaside town of Le Touquet in northern France, Huchon asks the kids to raise their hands if they believed the documentary.

One girl with her arm in the air says it's absolutely unconscionable what the United States did. Usually, about a third of the students believe the hoax, Huchon says, because they have no reason to be skeptical of him.

"And we play with this," he says. "We use this as a trap to make them realize that even when they are in confidence they should not believe de facto. They should have a few reflexes to try and fact-check a little bit more."

Huchon puts on a second video that tells the class that the first one was a total lie. It also explains how conspiracy theories are made to look credible: menacing music; trigger themes like the CIA and AIDS; highlighted text the viewer doesn't have time to read; and always some historical facts and truths sprinkled between the many lies.

The kids are shocked. Many feel tricked. So Huchon shows them how they can keep from being fooled again.

First off, he says, they have to check the authenticity of articles, pictures and videos. To do that they must first make sure that the author has put his name and the date on the work. That will help them cross-check the information on other sites. They should also try to go upstream to look for some of the original sources.

Another important element is to verify that the information is not taken out of context. That a picture, for example, does not claim to be taken somewhere it's not.

They talk about a picture making the rounds of anti-Muslim websites. It shows Muslim women wearing the burqa standing in line for welfare benefits. The face-covering veil is illegal in France. The picture was actually taken in London.

The class also has a long discussion about being careful with pictures and personal information on the Internet. Huchon explains to the kids how their personal information - even such minor things as "likes" on Facebook - is used by advertisers to target them. American voters were targeted in this way, he tells them, and it may have altered the 2016 presidential election.

After the two-hour session, 13-year-old Sharon Victor Caron says Huchon has changed the way she sees the Web.

"I'm going to be so much more careful now and not be fooled like so many people are," she says. "And I definitely will think before sharing something that could be false."

Huchon says a steady stream of teachers contacts him to come into their classes. He says it's not easy for the teachers because they are dealing with a generation that operates with new codes and has new ways of getting information. He says presenting alternate facts is not the way to combat conspiracy theories.

"When, for example, a pupil is going to put forward a conspiracy story about World War II and say that, for example, the gas chambers didn't exist, the teacher will be completely taken aback," says Huchon, and the teacher will often try to counter this discourse with facts.

Huchon says facts against facts is a fight you can never win. And conspiracy theories strip a teacher's authority.

"The best way to fight this kind of fake news discourse is not to give counterarguments," he says, "but to try to check the validity of the other person's argument."

President Emmanuel Macron has proposed enacting a law to fight fake news during French elections. Huchon says that won't work. He says the only way to win is to teach young people how to think critically.

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A Conspiracy Video Teaches Kids A Lesson About Fake News

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Our Take A Number series is exploring problems around the world through the lens of a single number. Today's number is 81, which is how many French schools a journalist visited to teach kids about disinformation on the Internet. As the bell rings, students file into class at Maxence Van der Meersch middle school.

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The 61 Best Teacher Memes on the Internet

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The 61 Best Teacher Memes on the Internet

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The 61 Best Teacher Memes On The Internet

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Has teaching pushed you to your limit? Recharge and laugh at some of these classic teacher memes we've rounded up, with special thanks to our WeAreTeachers Helpline community. By WeAreTeachers. Visit us at weareteachers.com

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A curation tool for collecting resources and designing lessons

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Tes provides a range of primary and secondary school teaching resources including lesson plans, worksheets and student activities for all curriculum subjects.

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Here is a sample blog that I created for M.A.T. students as a model. You and your students can easily create blogs on a variety of topics.

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When Dr. Tom Bigwood was principal of Southeast Bulloch High School in Brooklet, Georgia, he required teachers in all subject areas to have at least one writing topic each week. Yes, even math teachers had to give writing assignments! As a result, our small, rural school's state writing scores improved along with scores in other subjects. It really worked!

I was glad to see Mary Tedrow's article from MiddleWeb curated in NCLE SmartBrief last week. In " Make Writing a Daily Ritual in Every Subject," Tedrow suggests three simple steps for "launching a daily writing ritual," and she provides a link to writing prompts from The New York Times. Please click on the title of her article above to see what she has to say.

As you think about creating rituals in your classrooms, consider making writing one of them.

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When Dr. Tom Bigwood was principal of Southeast Bulloch High School in Brooklet, Georgia, he required teachers in all subject areas to have at least one writing topic each week. Yes, even math teachers had to give writing assignments! As a result, our small, rural school's state writing scores improved along with scores in other subjects.

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Using Video and Film in the Classroom.pdf

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Infographic Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart

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With Piktochart AI, you can create stunning infographics, reports, presentations, and more in seconds. No design experience needed. Start for free.

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Host interactive online meetings | Poll Everywhere

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Sample Lesson from Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction: Lesson 12 (Daniels & Steineke)

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Sample Lesson from Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction: Lesson 12 (Daniels & Steineke)

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Sample Chapter from TBKTS: Chapter 4 "Dialogue Journals"

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Sample Chapter from TBKTS: Chapter 4 "Dialogue Journals"

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Sample Chapter from The Best-Kept Teaching Secret: Chapter 1 "Letters Leverage Learning"

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Sample Chapter from The Best-Kept Teaching Secret: Chapter 1 "Letters Leverage Learning"

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The Best-Kept Teaching Secret (Daniels & Daniels)

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The Best-Kept Teaching Secret (Daniels & Daniels)

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Chapter 1. Letters Leverage Learning

Chapter 2. A Community of Correspondents

INTERCHAPTER: Prompts and Stems for Written Conversations

INTERCHAPTER: Is There Time for This?

Chapter 4. Dialogue Journals

INTERCHAPTER: The Assessment of Written Conversations

Chapter 6. Digital Discussions

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Chapter 1. Letters Leverage Learning Chapter 2. A Community of Correspondents INTERCHAPTER: Prompts and Stems for Written Conversations INTERCHAPTER: Is There Time for This? Chapter 4. Dialogue Journals INTERCHAPTER: The Assessment of Written Conversations Chapter 6. Digital Discussions

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The Thought-Filled Curriculum (Costa, 2008)

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The Thought-Filled Curriculum (Costa, 2008)

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The Thought-Filled Curriculum - Educational Leadership.pdf

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Skills Lab Playlist-Parts of Speech Review (Enos).pdf

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What's the Big Idea? Question-driven Units to Motivate Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Burke, 2010)

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What's the Big Idea? Question-driven Units to Motivate Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Burke, 2010)

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The English Teacher's Companion (Burke, 2012)

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The English Teacher's Companion (Burke, 2012)

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In the Best Interest of Students (Gallagher, 2015)

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In the Best Interest of Students (Gallagher, 2015)

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TED-Ed lessons on all subjects. TED-Ed celebrates the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Discover hundreds of animated lessons, create customized lessons, and share your big ideas.

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Using Playlists to Differentiate Instruction (Gonzalez, 2016

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Using Playlists to Differentiate Instruction (Gonzalez, 2016

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Listen to my interview with Tracy Enos or read the transcript here.

In our never-ending quest to find better ways to differentiate and personalize instruction for students, we have plenty of options. I covered a lot of the basics in my Differentiation Starter Kit. Then last year we learned how math teacher Natalie McCutchen manages a self-paced classroom. And for ESL students, there are the Can-Do Descriptors.

Now, Rhode Island teacher Tracy Enos shares her system for customizing instruction to meet the needs of every student. She calls it a playlist, an individualized digital assignment chart that students work through at their own pace.

First, consider what we usually do: When planning a typical unit of instruction, teachers map out a series of lessons to deliver, assignments for students to complete, and some kind of final assessment at the end. They might share this plan with students, but then the execution is done by the teacher: The teacher delivers the lessons, tells students when to do the assignments, and guides students toward the final assessment.

With playlists, the responsibility for executing the learning plan shifts: Students are given the unit plan, including access to all the lessons (in text or video form), ahead of time. With the learning plan in hand, students work through the lessons and assignments at their own pace. And because each student has her own digital copy of the playlist (delivered through a system like Google Classroom), the teacher can customize the list to meet each student's needs.

"A playlist is basically like a road map," Enos explains. "I started using them in my classroom when I looked at my room full of 26 students and I saw the variety in their abilities. I knew I needed something different so that I could meet the needs of each one of those kids. Instead of just saying, 'OK, everybody, we're going to work on this lesson today,' I needed to individualize it so that different kids are working on things that they needed."

The term playlist, by the way, was coined by one of Enos' colleagues, math teacher Jason Appel.

Here are screenshots of three sample playlists from Enos's class. If you click on each one, you'll be taken to the full version to view in Google Docs. Although these examples come from a language arts class, Enos feels strongly that the playlist concept could be used in any content area.

Argument Writing Playlist

The first playlist is for a unit on argument writing. What you see here is just the first few tasks; there are 19 on the full playlist.

In the first column, Enos simply names the task. The second column provides specific instructions for the task. The third column is set up for students to record any notes they have about the task, and the fourth is where students record the date they completed the task.

Although much of the playlist will be exactly the same for each student, especially for the first few tasks, individual tasks can be customized to meet individual needs. Because the playlist is stored in digital form, the teacher can go into each student's playlist at any time and make adjustments as needed.

In addition to adjusting certain tasks, Enos also builds space in each playlist for purely individualized tasks. If we look further down her playlist, we see that tasks #14 and #15 have been left open for individualized focus revision activities, to be determined after the student has written her draft:

Enos does place occasional hard deadlines into her playlists; item 13 above has a date assigned to it. Although students are allowed to complete the work before the deadline, having this task pinned to a specific date helps prevent students from getting too far off track from each other.

Parts of Speech Playlist

This next one is from a unit designed to review the parts of speech. Notice that some of the tasks are quite simple and quick: Students just need to log on to a certain platform, create an account, or join an online group. This makes the playlist a practical tool as well as a good instructional vehicle: One place to keep learning tasks AND the kinds of housekeeping items that accompany most units. And breaking units into smaller tasks gives students a feeling of accomplishment as they move through each item.

To see the full version of this playlist, click the image below:

Again, the "Directions" column allows for maximum flexibility. The teacher can add tech tips, reminders, or any other information that might help student complete the task more smoothly. And if this is done in digital form, the teacher can easily add tips, links, or other comments at any time, making the playlist a living document.

Book Club Playlist

The final example is a playlist created for a unit on dystopian fiction, in which students participated in book clubs.

Notice that the playlist also includes checkpoints, where students must touch base with their teacher before moving on. These can be built in at any point for any reason, such as making sure students have completed key housekeeping tasks (like in the example above) or having the teacher review a draft for quality.

Many of the tasks in the playlist will ultimately result in the student submitting work through Google Classroom, or they might require a paper submission in a class that hasn't gone quite so digital. In fact, the whole system could be done on paper-one look at how student learning is managed in a Montessori classroom and you'll see how that can work. What's key is that students work through the list on their own, which frees the teacher up to spend more time working one-on-one with students.

If students are truly working at their own pace, wouldn't that mean some are way ahead, even finished with a unit, while others drag way behind? Setting a few hard deadlines (as shown in the argument writing playlist) can help keep the pacing from spiraling too far out of whack, but if our goal is true individualization, then we shouldn't want everyone to be too closely aligned.

This can be managed on a day-to-day basis. Students who are taking longer to master key tasks will likely get more one-on-one assistance from the teacher or be placed in groups to help them. Those who finish the required material quickly can be given enrichment tasks that take the learning to more advanced levels.

Homework also takes on a different role in a class that uses playlists: Because students work through the playlists on their own, they decide whether they get homework or not. If a student is moving through a playlist quickly, they may not have a need to spend extra time on the work at home. Conversely, if a student finds he needs extra help in class, he may decide to catch up on a few videos at home.

For a more in-depth exploration of playlists, listen to my podcast interview with Tracy Enos using the player above or by listening on iTunes or Stitcher (for Android). If you have questions, ask them in the comments below and I'll have Tracy come over and answer them. And if you have used a system that's similar to playlists, please share your experiences in the comments so we can all learn together.♦

There's a lot more where this came from.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library-it's in there!

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Using Playlists to Differentiate Instruction

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Want better differentiation? Learn how to use this simple method for providing students with customized plans for working through a unit of study.

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Pear Deck is on a mission to help teachers create powerful learning moments for every student, every day - using the tools you already know and love.

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Services provided by Glogster.com have been temporarily disabled for operational reasons.

We are in the process of disabling all recurring payments, but we do recommend that you contact your bank or credit card company directly to halt them.

We would welcome the opportunity for investors who are interested in partnering with Glogster to contact us so that we are able to resume providing services to our customers who we have proudly served since 2008. Interested investors may contact the Glogster team here.

We apologize for the inconvenience that we know this disruption in service will cause and we hope to have Glogster back up and running better than ever in the near future. Thank you for your support over the last 14 years.

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Services provided by Glogster.com have been temporarily disabled for operational reasons. We are in the process of disabling all recurring payments, but we do recommend that you contact your bank or credit card company directly to halt them.

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NYT Learning Network: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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See the Glog! NYT Learning Network: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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Glog from Mar 23 2015: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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See the Glog! Glog from Mar 23 2015: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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CLASSROOM

If you're an individual teacher and want to get started with VoiceThread for just your class, a Single Educator License is the way go.

SCHOOL

Give all your students an accountable and transparent learning environment. Easily integrate with Google Apps.

DISTRICT

A District License provides simple multi-school management, application of custom security policies, and integration.

A walled garden, with beautiful views. Ed.VoiceThread is the perfect online environment for students to practice their communications skills online, yet in a controlled, accountable, and transparent setting.

Accountability and transparency. Students working within Ed.VoiceThread are protected by student-centered policies that ensure a safe and supportive environment:

Students cannot private message other students.

All student work is transparent to administrators and faculty within the school or district.

Student accounts can only interact with users that educators and administrators approve.

Custom tailored policies. Administrators can set global and individualized policies for students, enabling them to either restrict or give more freedom and autonomy, as age and local school policy dictates.

Reporting and analytics. Track usage and trends for individual users or your entire institution.

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Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.

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Summarizing Strategies from Kelly Gallagher

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Summarizing Strategies from Kelly Gallagher

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Shakespeare and the nature of adolescence (Birch, 2008)

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Shakespeare and the nature of adolescence (Birch, 2008)

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Shakespeare and the nature of adolescence.pdf

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Beyond Carrot and Sticks (Gonzalez, 2018)

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Beyond Carrot and Sticks (Gonzalez, 2018)

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A Bloomboard on motivation

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Beyond Carrots and Sticks: How Teachers Can Really Motivate Students

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Student motivation can be heavily influenced by factors teachers have no control over. But what about the things we can influence? This collection explores the research on the teacher behaviors, instructional moves and classroom conditions that are most likely to keep students motivated.

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The Mind's Eye Strategy (Cult of Pedagogy, 2014)

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The Mind's Eye Strategy (Cult of Pedagogy, 2014)

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This video shows you how to use Mind's Eye, a pre-reading strategy that helps students build mental images based on a selected list of words from the text. For a full review of this strategy, see the article at http://www.cultofpedagogy.com/minds-eye.

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Shakespeare is everywhere | Christopher Gaze | TEDxVancouver

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Sample Unit from ILA (International Literacy Association, 2015)

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Sample Unit from ILA (International Literacy Association, 2015)

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All things Kelly Gallagher, including my books, my schedule, teacher resources and what's going on in my life as a teacher.

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It's time to improve literacy skills during social studies instruction and ensure that readers of all abilities have what they need to access grade-level social studies concepts.

Join us on Thursday, December 7 for a look at scaffolded materials that provide extra literacy support while building key social studies concepts and skills.

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Newsela | Content and assessment platform

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Content Aligned To National & State Standard, Flexible To Support Relevant Curriculum. Find the Perfect Piece Of Content For Lessons. Go beyond the book.

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.