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SUNFLOWER - YCIS Y1-6 Onsite Sep. 2025 (2)

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POWER Cycles and Unit Planning  YCIS Y1-3 Onsite Sep 2025 (3)

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M.Ed. - Character Education

Post-Grad. Cert. - Early Literacy Development

25+ years PK-G2 classroom teacher

Literacy Coach, Mentor Program Coordinator

Finds joy in: word study, creating caring classrooms, reigniting teacher’s joy, eating ice cream, swimming and travel

miles@erinkentconsulting.com

linkedin.com/in/milesmadison/

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https://erinkentconsulting.com/community

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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About the Community | Erin Kent Consulting (EKC)

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A few special gifts for signing up now: a strategy call with Erin Kent or an EKC Senior Strategist to get started using the EKC Community to support your current literacy initiatives; and 5 free spots in our live, virtual winter courses ($1495 value!)

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Curriculum based measurement Probe Generator | Writing | Intervention Central|

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The Curriculum based measurement Probe Generator for writing is an important tool that can be included as part of a teacher resources network for classroom management

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think SRSD (self-regulated strategy development)

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Understand the key characteristics of SRSD that make it a deeply structured and evidence-based approach to teaching writing. Transform your classroom today.

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The Writing Revolution - Empower teachers to help students

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By training educators in The Hochman Method©, The Writing Revolution (TWR) aims to help all students become proficient writers, readers, and critical thinkers.

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Welcome to our library of free Templates and Printables!

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Welcome to our library of free Templates and Printables! You must be a free member to access this page, please log in below to gain access. If you lost your password click the 'Lost your password?' button below Lost your password? If you are not currently a member, please sign up below.

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Copy of Writing- Small Group Planner Templates 

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Writing Lesson w/ Transfer Planner KG-G2

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Strategies for teaching writing in the early grades - Podcast

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Strategies for teaching writing in the early grades - Podcast

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206: Amy Siracusano describes the Not So Simple View of Writing and explains how this model helps us make instructional decisions when teaching young writers. She also shares a variety of strategies that will help you teach students at all different stages. Lots of goodness in this episode!
Click here for the show notes from this episode. Get my book, Reach All Readers!

Looking for printable resources that align with the science of reading?
Click here to learn more about our popular and affordable membership for PreK through 3rd grade educators.

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Strategies for teaching writing in the early grades - with Amy Siracusano

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206: Amy Siracusano describes the Not So Simple View of Writing and explains how this model helps us make instructional decisions when teaching young writers. S

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Writing the Way to Better Reading - Podcast with Judith Hochman (Founder of Writing Revolution)

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Writing the Way to Better Reading - Podcast with Judith Hochman (Founder of Writing Revolution)

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S9 E11: Writing the way to better reading, with Judith Hochman, Ed.D.

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Podcast-Folge · Science of Reading: The Podcast · 26.02.2025 · 38 Min.

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The Writing Revolution - the Interview: Podcast

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The Writing Revolution - the Interview: Podcast

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From July 22, 2022

The Writing Revolution authors, Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, share a 'revolutionary' approach to writing. The best part: It begins at the sentence level AND content knowledge drives the rigor. Moreover, there is an overlap in reading, writing, and critical thinking.

What are the principles of The Writing Revolution? There are six:

1. Students need explicit instruction in writing, beginning in the early elementary grades.

2. Sentences are the building blocks of all writing.

3. When embedded in the content of the curriculum, writing instruction is a powerful teaching tool.

4. The content of the curriculum drives the rigor of the writing activities.

5. Grammar is best taught in the context of student writing.

6. The two most important phases of the writing process are planning and revising.

The Writing Revolution, Not for Profit

The Writing Revolution, The Atlantic, October 2012

Writing and cognitive load theory, Natalie Wexler

We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at NightGrab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.comJoin our community on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter.

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[Listen Again] The Writing Revolution with Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler

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From July 22, 2022 The Writing Revolution authors, Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, share a 'revolutionary' approach to writing. The best part: It begins at

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Getting Formative Assessments Right: Podcast 

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Getting Formative Assessments Right: Podcast 

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236: Five Conditions for Getting Formative Assessment Right

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Podcast-Folge · The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast · 14.10.2024 · 47 Min.

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Writing is a task as complex and multifaceted as reading-but it's often taught as a single skill. Discover how to plan and deliver comprehensive, explicit, and evidence-based writing instruction with this groundbreaking book, aligned with IDA's Structured Literacy approach and based on the latest research.

Joan Sedita's innovative Writing Rope weaves multiple skills and strategies into five fundamentals of a comprehensive writing curriculum: critical thinking, syntax (sentences), text structure, writing craft, and transcription (spelling and handwriting). Teachers of Grades 4-8 will get crystal-clear guidelines that demystify the process of helping students learn to write and write to learn across academic content areas. And with dozens of included templates, handouts, and other resources-available for download online-teachers will have all the tools they need to design and deliver explicit, high-quality writing instruction.

Perfect for professional development, this invaluable planning guide will help teachers apply the science of reading to the skill of writing-and help students master a critically important aspect of literacy.

TEACHERS WILL:

Learn the fundamentals of effective writing instruction. Get research-based background knowledge about writing development, the five components of the Writing Rope framework, the role of fluent transcription skills in proficient writing, and the intentional choices proficient writers make about writing craft.

Apply evidence-based practices in the classroom. Teach essential skills all students must learn to become proficient writers, focusing on critical thinking strategies for generating ideas and gathering information before writing, strategies for each stage of the writing process, syntactic awareness and sentence writing, paragraph writing, and skillful structuring of different types of text.

Help students "write to learn." Teach students how to use writing to enhance their learning across different content areas. Learn how to plan effective writing assignments in different content areas, and explicitly teach students skills for summarizing texts and writing about narrative and expository text.

PRACTICAL MATERIALS: Apply the Writing Rope framework to support your students' writing skills with classroom activities, Connect to Your Classroom questions, suggestions for scaffolding, a Writing Assignment Guide to use with any grade or content area, and 40+ reproducible instructional resources for students and teachers.

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Writing is a task as complex and multifaceted as reading-but it's often taught as a single skill. Discover how to plan and deliver comprehensive, explicit, and evidence-based writing instruction with this groundbreaking book, aligned with IDA's Structured Literacy approach and based on the latest research.

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The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley Buy this book from: You may need a writing revolution in your classroom. Here's how to lead it. Expectations about student writing have changed dramatically in recent years.

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Equipped with this comprehensive guide, educators will be poised to implement decision-driven assessment, armed with practical tools and strategies to…

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TCRWP Narrative Writing Learning Progression 

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TCRWP Narrative Writing Learning Progression 

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TCRWP Information Writing Learning Progression

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TCRWP Information Writing Learning Progression

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TCRWP Opinion Writing Learning Progression

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TCRWP Opinion Writing Learning Progression

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Writing Revolution Possible Assessments and Rubrics

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Writing Revolution Possible Assessments and Rubrics

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Whole Class/Small Group Word Feature Concepts 

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The Writing Revolution - Editable Templates

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The Writing Revolution - Editable Templates

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TWR_ Sentence Level Strategies_ All K-2 Templates.pptx

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Writers Workshop (TCRWP) Genre Rubrics and Checklists

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Writers Workshop (TCRWP) Genre Rubrics and Checklists

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Copy of Using AI to Analyze Student Writing and Plan Writing Conferences

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Anita Archer - gives explicit examples of how to involve whole class

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When educators ask, what is the one action we can take to improve student learning, my answer is universal no matter the grade level or domain; Increase the Opportunities to Respond. This action is truly transformative. However, as with many instructional practices, HOW we implement the practice makes a difference. The following four Essentials of Active Participation can inform and guide our practice. I'll cover these and other ideas in my upcoming webinar, for which you can register here.

Essential No. 1: Request frequent responses from students.

While there are many reasons for asking students to respond during lessons, research has emerged with four clear and consistent benefits. (MacSuga-Gage & Simonsen, 2015; Van Camp, Wehby, Martin, Wright & Sutherland, 2020) First, as responses increase so do students' on-task behavior, a definite contributor to learning. Second, increased responses increase academic learning, the primary goal of education. If students are continually asked to rehearse information and to retrieve information from memory, retention is optimized. Third, perhaps the greatest gift to teachers, disruptive behaviors are reduced when students are responding academically throughout the lesson. Finally, increasing opportunities to respond increases the intensity of interventions.

You may be wondering how many responses might be desirable. Again, research provides some guidelines, though they need to be viewed as guidelines not mandates. (MacSuga-Gage & Simonsen, 2015; Simonsen & Myers, 2015) If simple responses such as unison choral responses, gestures, or holding up response cards are requested, effective teachers generally provided three to five opportunities to respond per minute. When the responses were more complex such as sharing with a partner or solving a math problem on a whiteboard at least one response per minute was elicited. In other words, many responses are requested in each lesson.

Essential No. 2: Require overt responses-saying, writing, doing.

To be effective, overt responses in which students say, write, or do something must be requested in all lessons in all subject areas. While thinking and silent reading, covert responses, might be embedded in a lesson, overt responses are necessary so we can monitor and check student learning, provide corrective and affirmative feedback, and adjust the lesson based on student performance.

You might want to adopt this motto that is posted and followed in many schools:
Every day, in every class, every student is participating by speaking, writing, or doing.

Essential No. 3: Involve all students.

To optimize learning and equity in our schools, everyone needs to do everything during instruction; everyone says, writes, or does something to show their understanding. In other words, a " No Opt Out " school policy should be adopted paired with classroom practices and expectations. Of course, this policy needs to be coupled with quality instruction, targeted scaffolds that set students up for success, and a safe environment in which students can take risks and make mistakes without embarrassment or bullying.

How might a school start on the Everyone does Everything (Feldman, 2021) path? The first step is to adopt a " No Hands Raised "policy. (Wiliam, 2014) Students can be taught to only raise their hands when the teacher directs them to raise their hands or when they seek clarification or elaboration from the instructor. The dangers of having students raise their hands and calling on volunteers are well known to teachers: 1) The more assertive, higher-performing students volunteer more often and receive more practice than their peers. 2) The same students volunteer again and again. 3) Over time, other students begin to opt out, reducing their learning. 4) The teacher does not have a valid measure of student understanding from this selective participation.

However, the most important reason for moving away from calling on volunteers or even non-volunteers is that these practices reduce the number of responses that each student makes in a lesson. Let's say that I have a class of 20 students and call on each student once. Each student would make one response. However, if ALL students say answers chorally, share answers with their partners, write down talking points before a discussion, solve a math problem on a whiteboard, or hold up a response card, each student would make 20 responses. More learning will occur with 20 responses versus one.

Essential No. 4: Structure the active participation procedure.

All high-leverage instructional practices, including active participation procedures, are intentional, structured, planned, and consistently implemented. Let's look at a number of common practices and the structure needed for optimum use.

Choral Responses

When answers are short and the same, teachers can request that students say the answer together. However, the teacher must act like the conductor of the school band or choir. The teacher must direct the students using a vocal signal such as "everyone" or a hand signal. Without a signal or cue, students will blurt out the answer and other students will simply mimic their peers.

Partner Responses

When answers are long and different, teachers might ask students to share answers with their assigned partners. Again, structure beyond "turn and talk" should be added. First, to avoid one of the partners dominating the partnership, the teacher should assign designations such as 1 and 2, A and B, or Blue and Red, so the teacher can direct one of the students to share the answer. Second, the teacher can give a job to both partners. For example, the teacher might say, "Ones, tell your partner the answer to the question. Twos, then tell your partner if you agree or disagree and why."

Class Discussions

Class discussions generally engage a small number of repeat participants. To increase the effectiveness and equity of discussions, the teacher can provide a well-planned prompt, give all students time to record their talking points, and have all students share their talking points with their partners. Thus, ALL students have been included. Also, having rehearsed their ideas, more students will join the formal class discussion

Hold-ups

Students can be asked to respond by holding up their whiteboards, their fingers to indicate the correct answer out of four, or their True or False response cards. However, if students hold-up their whiteboards, fingers, or response cards as soon as they formulate their answers, some students may copy their peers' responses. Instead, the students can form their answers on their desks and teacher can signal, "Show Me."

Truly, Learning is NOT a Spectator Sport.If our mission is to enhance student learning, we must request structured, frequent, overt responses from all students. May you and your school make increasing opportunities to respond a priority. Everyone will benefit. I hope you'll join me for my presentation on April 7.

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Learning Is Not a Spectator Sport: Essentials of Active Participation

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When educators ask, what is the one action we can take to improve student learning, my answer is universal no matter the grade level or domain; Increase the Opportunities to Respond. This action is truly transformative.

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A reflection of my journey - slideshow shows my progress this term as detailed in this blog post.

Introduction to SRSD

If you have been following any of my posts, you will know that my journey into evidence-based practice in all areas led me to SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) last year. I started to explore what I could find online and quickly realised that, even though I was only scratching the surface of what SRSD is, the impacts on my class's writing were obvious.

I listened to numerous podcasts and read as much as I could find, discovering that SRSD truly fits the bill for an evidence-based approach to writing. I must preface this by saying that I am not an expert; my qualifications lie in my commitment to using best practices and making this work in a typical New Zealand classroom.

Professional Learning Development (PLD) with ThinkSRSD

As a staff, we collectively decided to undertake Professional Learning Development (PLD) in ThinkSRSD. Our goal is to develop a shared learning language across the school. This is a year-long commitment, but it has been encouraging to see classes engaging in both collaborative and independent writing already. We are working through this in bite sized amounts at staff meetings and trying as we go along. This allows us to reflect on how things are going, share our practice and assist each other to iron out any issues as we go. SRSD will be a wonderful addition to our approach when using the Science of Literacy. We can see the benefits it will have for both reading and writing.

The Importance of Colourful Semantics

If you have read any of my other posts on writing, you will know that I greatly value colourful semantics as a framework for building sentences. Much of what I have learned over the years has returned to sentence-level construction. Writing, like all areas of learning, is a skill built on many pieces of understanding that must come together to form the 'end' product we eventually see.

Rethinking Writing Instruction

Writing is one of the most cognitively complex processes we ask children to undertake. I have come to realise that it has only been in the last four or five years that my practice has started to reflect this fact. For too long, my approach was based on the simplistic notion that we get better at writing by writing. I have learned that this overlooks the necessity of deliberately building the foundational skills children need to write effectively.

Colourful semantics, developing the foundations of writing and the building of complete sentences form the bedrock of our initial approach to writing, and this became my starting point for this year's instruction.

Ultimately it all comes back to oral language and so, this is where we must start.

We used videos, images and shared books to create shared sentences, using colourful semantics as our framework. This linked beautifully to learning about writing a GIST sentence.

We then used big books again to explicitly focus on details. Working on writing these details together and linking to some kind of ending sentence.

Once I felt that the children had a good understanding of what a detail is, we transitioned into using our reading sessions to gather these details. If you are familiar with our whole-class reading approach, you will know that our character stories play a significant role in this process.

I introduced TIDE to the children, and we learned each part of this mnemonic. We then read our character stories and analysed them using TIDE, identifying our topic sentence, important details, and ending. For now, ID will be used together.

Children drew the details and took these home for reading.

They also had a go at writing these details independently, with a little scaffolded support in the form of a word chart. I use word charts like this a lot, they are a great scaffold for children into independent sentence writing.

From here I wanted to use the character stories we did have, to write a piece collaboratively about our farm friends. In order to do this, I needed to introduce POW.

We started by reading our character stories again and then reading the prompt.

"Tell us about the farm friends". In this context, the us, is our parents as we intended to take home what we had written.

P1 - We wrote our GIST statement, this would form our topic sentence.

From there we moved on to O, organise our ideas. Children were already familiar with TIDE, we used this to plan our writing. Referring to our ideas, using our GIST for the topic sentence and then working together on what we think could be a good ending.

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ThinkSRSD - my journey so far with my Year 1 and 2 class

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A reflection of my journey - slideshow shows my progress this term as detailed in this blog post. Introduction to SRSD If you have been fo...

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Whole Staff Sunflower YCIS Onsite Jan 2026 (1)

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Essentials for Structured Writing Programs

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Essentials for Structured Writing Programs

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POWER Cycles and Unit Planning - CAC Onsite Jan. 2026 (2)