Implementation | Burkins & Yaris

What Color is Your Library?

May 22, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

We both live among hundreds of books. There are books in our personal spaces and books in our work spaces, books in our cars and in our purses; books on kitchen counters and books propped up on dining room buffets inviting the children to serve themselves. Given that we live with books everywhere, we tend to find ourselves searching for that particular book we need, whether for a teachable moment with a child (or with ourselves) or for a professional learning we are planning. Not surprisingly, we haven’t arrived at a perfect system for organizing a library, whether personal, professional, or classroom. Each organizing structure we try has its own advantages and disadvantages. Of late, however, we’ve been exploring the benefits of looser organizational structures.

In his book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger makes a case for less systematic organization. We have found some truth in this idea. The paragraphs that follow present four ways of organizing classroom libraries, moving from more to less structured. We stop short of random order, because some structure seems necessary to function.

We would like to add that, any organizing structure we try must support our assumption that browsing a library is time well spent. We are searching for ways to balance becoming eternally consumed with locating specific titles when we need them and knowing exactly where every book is. We have grown to understand that the latter option, while hugely appealing to our very Type A personalities, is limiting in many ways. Quite often, our best reading comes from noticing the books we come around randomly as we are searching for others. The search itself serves a purpose, so we don’t want our organizing schemes to eliminate our wanderings completely.

Organizing structure #1: Reading Level

With the current emphasis on complex text there is intense interest in the quantitative levels of books. Many of us have lived through the days of sorting books into bins by levels or taking children to the library and telling them they can only check out books on their current reading levels. There are absolute benefits to this structure, but they are outweighed, in our opinion, by the drawbacks, the delineation of which is not the point of this blog post. Suffice it to say, the science of leveling texts and then leveling children to match is pseudo-science at best. Often, after all the leveling we are startled to find so many children reading books that don’t suit them and/or books that hold no relevance for them. If it isn’t obvious, we are down on sorting books by level.

Organizing structure #2: Topic or Genre

This organizing strategy holds promise because it brings students of all reading levels to common shelves. It offers variety and better integrates the classroom. A drawback, perhaps, is that students, like adults, have their favorite topics and genres. Visiting the same shelf over and over may not offer them enough incidental exposure to new ideas. You can compensate for this by setting in place routines where students share books with each other across genres. For us, sorting by topic or genre can work well, as long as the topics aren’t too narrow.

Organizing structure #3: Genre-ish and Topic-ish and Size

The third organizing structure is basically a loose variation on the second structure. This is a structure that tries to balance order and practicality. We are partial to it because it pushes back on our OCDness, has benefits of order and randomness. Basically start with a few categories, generally sort books into those as much as they fit in terms of size and shape. So basically, all the small nature books are together on one shelf, but the big nature books are on a different shelf, and still some other, random nature books may be scattered among other books. As crazy as this sounds, your odds of finding what you need are relatively fast, but there is also a high browsing benefit to this option. With this sort-of organized/sort-or disorganized structure, you generally know where things are but you get to look through books pretty regularly as well.

Organizing structure #4: Color and Size

This last structure is intriguing to us and was the inspiration for this post. In the design world there has been a trend to organize books by color. Sound crazy? We think it does, at least a bit. Still, when we try to think about why sorting by color won’t work, we can’t find a real problem with it. In fact, given that children are so cued into visual today, and given that we have a mental image of almost all our books, sorting by color seems to lend a wonderful randomness for browsing as well as a reasonable order for finding what you need with relative ease. And wouldn’t this be fun for kids and beautiful in classrooms? PLEASE, let us know if you try this!

Filed Under: balance, Classroom libraries, Implementation, Instruction, Literacy Block, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Uncategorized Tagged With: classroom library, Common Core, independent reading, organizing books by color, personal library, sorting books by color, text levels

Library Power: Organizing Books

May 21, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 1 Comment

A teacher friend, Allison, recently told us about watching her kindergarten students play Hi-Ho! Cherry-O. As they were deciding which tree and character each would play, an African-American boy said, “I know which one I will play,” and he turned the board so the dark skinned boy was in front of him. He said, “He looks like me.”

Allison also shared that she sometimes wonders if her concerns that students find themselves in the books she reads with them are somehow exaggerated. Does diversity in images really matter? After watching her students play Hi Ho! Cherry-O, she realized that not only is diversity an important text selection criterion, it is a critical one. Children need to see representations of themselves in the games they play, the television they watch, and the books they read.

At the moment, Kim and Jan are miles apart (New York and Georgia) knee deep in identical collections of all the books that Lerner Publisher publishes and distributes. We are working with them as they restructure their collection, reorganize their catalog, develop their books into topical categories, and consider the ways their content can support instruction in the Common Core. The collection includes an abundance of non-fiction, including biography, narrative nonfiction, informational texts about how things are made, etc.

We are charged with gathering books along themes and today, as we worked with other writers and educators moving books in and out of categories, our colleague,Bridget, noticed the many biographies in our “girl” collection. She said, “If you look at the covers of these books, you get a very different rendering of history than that traditionally told.”

Bridget went on to observe the real power of labeling book categories, sorting history, and teaching about people. It’s a weighty responsibility and as we work to decide whether we name a category “Strong Girls,” “Female Protagonists,” or “You Go Girl,” we will always second guess ourselves. Do we make libraries geared toward boys? Towards girls? If so, what goes in them? Do we give girls a book about monster trucks and boys a book about the color pink because this will break stereotypes? Which books are worthy of being included? Which ones do we throw out?

Much like our conversations about balance or scheduling a literacy block, the point can’t be that the categories are “right” or “best.” There will always be pros and cons to a categorization, whether books or schedules. The real point is recognizing the power that we wield when we sort something into a category, especially resources that teach children. Our choices subtly influence developing minds which means that if our intent is to act on the behalf and best interest of children,we must remain committed to questioning our choices and continuing our conversations about the choices we make.

Filed Under: Classroom libraries, Collaboration, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction Tagged With: CCSS, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, comprehension, critical thinking, Implementation, Instruction, Reading

Four Advantages to “Real Books” Over E-books

May 20, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

Summer is here and we know how teachers will spend their summers. While some time will be spent unwinding, relaxing, and enjoying their families, most teachers will also spend a chunk of their summer thinking about next year! From reading a book about writing conferences to reconsidering your room arrangement, next year begins before this year really ends. Among the topics forefront on the minds of many teachers is building, arranging, and organizing their classroom library. Today’s post, which marks the first in a series of posts about classroom libraries, offers reasons that traditional books trump e-books. This doesn’t mean that we don’t see a place for e-books in the classroom; e-books do pose certain advantages. It means, however, that we are partial to ink on paper.

1. “Real Books” have a presence in the classroom.

While you can have a digital, classroom library, it does not hold a presence in your classroom. Classroom libraries are the heart of a classroom, and need to be developed and nurtured. Even if you are teaching math, even if it is not “independent reading time,” the classroom library stands beside you as you teach as a reminder of reading’s importance and the centrality of books in the work of becoming a lifelong learner.

2. Browsing and Incidental Reading

Whatever convenience comes from ebooks, the act of searching the library to find something to read is very different with ebooks than that with traditional books. We are less likely to actually open a book when we look through a digital library because the process feels more encumbered. The act of browsing helps us find other books we want to read and makes the experience of reading more full. When we think of spending an afternoon in a library or bookstore browsing titles, we get giddy. While browsing books online can be fun, it doesn’t have elicit the same visceral response from us.

3. Interactiveness

We (Kim & Jan) spend too much time in front of a computer already. Some days we really have to work through the fatigue of spending hours staring at a monitor. The physicality of holding books, touching the paper, taking in the composition and art of each page in some ways helps us take care of ourselves. For children who spend a lot of time in a desk, physically moving in, around, and with books seems like a healthier option than more time in front of a screen.

4. Our Reading Histories

The other day Jan pulled out a box of board books that her twins, now seventeen, enjoyed when they were toddlers. The books bring back a flood of memories and the covers bear record to a shared family history. Books wear out in ways that ebooks don’t, and like the Velveteen Rabbit, the wear makes them real. From teeth marks to food stains to worn and torn pages, the transactional love between a reader and a text is recorded in the flesh of both. All good real books, as well as the experience of reading and interacting with them, are love stories.

Filed Under: Classroom libraries, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Creativity, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Implementation, Instruction, Musings, Planning for Instruction, Reading Tagged With: CCSS, classroom library, Common Core State Standards, ebooks, independent reading, real books, traditional books

Thursday Thought: Who’s Doing the Work

May 16, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

This week, we have been reflecting on building background knowledge and how to support students without shouldering the weight of the work (and the learning). On Tuesday, we raised the question, Who’s doing the work? As we look back on old posts, we realize that certain questions surface as themes for us and this idea of shifting the burden of the workload to students is most definitely one of them. Today we return you to a post that we wrote this past November and aptly titled Who is Doing the Work? Here we share four important questions that will help you help students do more of the work and more of the learning!

Filed Under: background knowledge, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Comprehension Strategies, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Thursday Thought Tagged With: CCSS, Close Read, Close Reads, college and career readiness, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, critical thinking, Implementation, Instruction, Reading

Building Background Knowledge: Harnessing the Power of the Internet

May 15, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 1 Comment

In yesterday’s post, Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?, we shared a story of fifth grade students working with Cyrus Cassells’s “Soul Make a Path Through Shining,” a sophisticated poem about the Civil Rights Movement. Containing words like “minotaur,” “hydra-headed,” and “maelstrom” the difficult vocabulary presented itself as the most obvious obstacle to understanding the poem prompting the fifth graders to collectively share their knowledge of the hard words and look up others words they did not know. What we did not share yesterday, however, was that while this contributed to clearing up some confusion, most students did not emerge with a crystal clear understanding of the poem. They still felt like there were gaps in their understanding which meant that yet again, they were faced with a decision: Do I say “oh well” and call it good enough? Or do I continue to work to figure it out?

In fifth grade, informational reading standard seven requires that students “draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.” We have affectionately dubbed this “The Multi Media Standard” and are particularly drawn to the words “locate an answer to a question or to solve a problem efficiently.”

Yesterday we shared that the students thought of dictionary.com as a potential resource for solving the problem of lack of word knowledge. Surely, typing in a word and having the definition pop up is efficient. However, while lack of word knowledge was the only problem these children could identify, it was not the only problem these students faced. The other part of the problem was understanding the bigger context of the poem which required knowing about Elizabeth Eckford and her first day of school at Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957. But when Kim asked students what they might google in order to find additional information to help them construct greater meaning about this text, the students perseverated on words. In their minds, the best solution to figuring out this puzzle was making sure they knew every word in the poem.

As teachers, one of the daily dilemmas of our jobs is knowing when to let inquiry guide student learning and when to intervene with direct, explicit instruction. In this case, students needed to be taught how to further mine text for keywords that would assist their Google search for information to help them more thoroughly understand what they were reading. They needed to pay attention to the title of the poem and learn more about the poet. They needed the bit of introductory text that explained that Cassells wrote this poem after being inspired by the documentary Eyes on the Prize. And they needed a teacher to help them see their needs.

While many of our Common Core aligned lessons have students reading closely and carefully to cite evidence and make logical inferences, we can say that only a few have paid attention to standard number seven and the ways in which digital resources need to support students’ meaning making processes. As you consider ways to build background knowledge, we ask you to think about whether you, like us, have adequately addressed standard number seven and taught students to harness the power of the Internet. And as always, we ask you to share with us what you have done to support this effort!

Filed Under: background knowledge, Close Reads, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Comprehension Strategies, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Reading in the Content Areas, Staircase of Complexity Tagged With: CCSS, Close Read, close reading, Close Reads, college and career readiness, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, complex text, comprehension, critical thinking, gradual release of responsibility, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Reading

Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?

May 14, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 3 Comments

In yesterday’s post, The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences, we discussed the importance of building background knowledge by searching for companion texts to read aloud and share with students. As we continue to think about this idea, we have a question for you: How many times have you read something and thought to yourself, “I have no idea what that is about”?

When this happens as a reader, you have two choices. The first, more passive response (the one that students most often choose) is to say, “Oh well” and continue on satisfied with not knowing. The second, more active response is to say, “How will I figure this out?” and work to pull together whatever resources you need to make it make sense. While passivity has always stood in the path of deep thinking and learning, from the Common Core era all the way into lifelong learning, passivity on the part of readers has dire consequences. Standard number ten requires that students “read and comprehend literary and informational texts independently and proficiently,” so if students do not work to figure things out, they are not practicing reading closely and carefully. If they are not practicing reading closely and carefully, they are not thinking about the big picture and considering what they know about words and how text works. They are not thinking about the author’s point of view of utilizing their research skills to find answers to the questions about which they wonder. In short, they are practicing none of what standards 1-9, college and career readiness, or lifelong learner-ship ask of them. They are becoming neither more independent nor more proficient. Attaining independence and proficiency seems to begin with nurturing a desire to know and nurturing a desire to persist until the curiosity is quelled.

In a recent demonstration lesson, Kim worked with a group of fifth graders reading Cyrus Cassells’s “Soul Make a Path Through Shining,” a very sophisticated poem about the Civil Rights movement containing words like “minotaur” and “hydra-headed” and “maelstrom.” The class unanimously agreed that the poem was hard but rather than quit and say, “Oh well,” Kim nudged them to consider what they could do to figure it out. Several students said that they could reread the poem but others chimed in that they felt that rereading would do them no good because the real problem was the words. How would reading the same unfamiliar words over and over help you? they wondered. That’s when they decided that if the piece that was missing from this puzzle was word knowledge, they’d need to somehow solve that problem. They decided that the first thing they’d do would be to talk to each other to collectively share what they knew about the words they didn’t know and after that they’d go to dictionary.com.

Pre-Common Core, Kim might have begun this lesson by saying, “When you read this poem, you are going to meet some tough words. To help you understand, let’s talk about what the word minotaur means … .” Instead, Kim let students discover their own problems and work to find viable solutions. In this teaching scenario, she assumed the role of coach, the one who stands to the side and lets the kids run around the field kicking the ball. She interjected advice and intervened when necessary and, by allowing them the opportunity to “excavate” for problems (Fisher and Frey, Building Background Knowledge, p.34, 2009), she nurtured the curiosity and persistence needed for creating independent and proficient readers.

Filed Under: background knowledge, Close Reads, Collaboration, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, complex text, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Staircase of Complexity Tagged With: CCSS, Close Read, close reading, Close Reads, college and career readiness, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, complex text, comprehension, critical thinking, gradual release of responsibility, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Reading

The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences

May 13, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 2 Comments

Oftentimes, as teachers, we face the dilemma of wanting students to read an article or story when we know they have little or no background knowledge about the topic. For example, maybe we’d like to share Patricia Polacco’s Pink and Say with students. We want them to marvel at the relationship between Pinkus and Sheldon, but without understanding the relationship between blacks and whites during the 1860s and a brief history of the Civil War, we know that our students won’t be able to fully understand the depth of its uniqueness. So what do we do? We fill in the gaps. We begin talking about what life was like in the 1800s. We describe slavery. We talk about the Civil War and then we read aloud or ask the students to read the text themselves, depending on their age and ability. When all is said and done, the burden of connecting this new background knowledge to the new text falls on us. We do all the work.

Furthermore, we must ask ourselves: Is this powerful enough for students to really understand? Just because we provide students this information, have we given them what they need to mine the text for its deepest meanings and ideas?

We suspect that more times than not, our attempts to fill in the gaps in this way are not memorable enough to act as the solid foundation students need to deepen their understanding of new concepts. Building background knowledge needs to be an active process that requires students to “survey (know where to look), excavate (bring it to the surface), and analyze (examine it closely) (Fisher and Frey, Building Background Knowledge, p. 34, 2009). If our objective is to teach children what it means to set a goal and make plans to achieve it, we’ve got to create a learning experience that won’t be easily forgotten.

So, what constitutes a memorable learning experience? If you polled children about the parts of their school experience that they remember best, many would recount a favorite story that a teacher read aloud. Still to this day, Kim can remember sitting at the edge of her seat waiting with Ramona “for the present” while her second grade teacher read aloud Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest. Stories allow children opportunities to experience the unfamiliar while at the same time giving them a chance to wrestle with issues that remain universal in our lives.(Gallagher, p. 66, Readicide, 2009) Read aloud remains one of the most inviting and memorable experiences we know for building background knowledge so before you read aloud or ask students to read Pink and Say, don’t tax yourself with recounting a brief history of the Civil War. Instead, consider channelling your efforts toward finding informational texts and other stories about slavery and the Civil War that serve as a companion to Pink and Say. Read aloud and help students BUILD the background knowledge they need to understand.

Fisher, Douglas, and Nancy Frey. Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009. Print.

Gallagher, Kelly, and Richard L. Allington. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It. Portland, Me.: Stenhouse, 2009. Print.

Filed Under: background knowledge, Close Reads, complex text, Comprehension Strategies, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, text selection, Uncategorized Tagged With: building background knowledge, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, comprehension, connections, memorable learning, Patricia Polacco, Pink and Say

Weekend Round Up May 10

May 10, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

Monday

April Favorites 2013

This post describes our most popular posts for April 2013. These posts drew the most traffic to the site and were tweeted the most during the month of April.

Tuesday

The Quintessential Learner

In this post, Kim recounts a story she heard Gail Boushey and Joan Moser tell about meeting Donald Graves at a conference years ago. She thinks about the question “What are you on about?” and poses that question to the Burkins and Yaris readership.

Wednesday

Them’s Fightin’ Words

In this post, we delve into the little talked about step-child of the Common Core standards-the foundational skils.

Thursday

To Be Decodable or Not To Be Decodable

In this post, Jan writes about her son who, as an emergent reader, loves to read DICK AND JANE.

Filed Under: balance, Collaboration, College and Career Ready, Complete Literacy, Foundational Skills, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Instruction, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Reflections Tagged With: CCSS, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, critical thinking, foundational skills, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, phonics

To Be Decodable or Not to Be Decodable

May 9, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 3 Comments

by Jan Burkins

Having crossed the bridge from emergent to somewhat fluent, my fourth and last son seems to have made it to the other side of learning to read. All early signs indicated that it was likely that he would be successful with the literacy milestone, but with each child I have harbored the secret fear that he will have trouble learning to read and that I will have simultaneously failed as a mother and as a reading specialist.

All four boys have grown up in the days of Fountas and Pinnell and patterned texts, a controlled vocabulary format to which I’m partial, and which is receiving much criticism with the Common Core. When my twin sons were learning to read twelve years ago, their grandmother sent them an anthology of Dick and Jane titles. My mother did not know that such texts were politically incorrect for reading specialists.

Dick and Jane are criticized because the language is contrived. It is. And there isn’t any racial or socioeconomic diversity in the illustrations. But that doesn’t seem to matter to five-year-old Victor, who laughs uproariously when Baby closes herself up in an umbrella.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh, Dick.

Look and see.

See Baby.

By reading the words, which he does independently, and looking at the pictures (integrated processing), Victor’s sweet little reading process mirrors a grown-up reading process. He is reading for meaning, despite the stilted text. Feeling some reading specialist guilt, I pull out a Level A, predictable text and give it to Victor.

Dog paints birds.

Dog paints apples.

Dog paints trees.

Victor is not impressed. He reads the words quickly and doesn’t really think about the “story.” Now, finished with the dog that paints, Victor wants Baby back, along with Jane and Dick and Sally, despite their narrow representations of life.

But will Dick and Jane scar Victor? Victor is dark skinned, biracial, and not represented in this book. Our family looks nothing like Dick’s. I never wear pearls or vacuum in house dresses and heels. My husband does all the cooking. Oh, oh, oh. Look at the sushi.

But Dick and Jane have Victor; he is learning about characters. They have become friends. Now, Tim the Teddy Bear has fallen into a pit. Victor is concerned.

Sally said, “I see Tim.

Tim is down, down, down.

Jump down, Father.

Jump down, Dick.

I want Tim.”

Oh, the sexism. Sally could jump, damn it! She could jump, too.

So I let Victor read Dick and Jane, which he returns to night after night as his fluency builds. But will Victor be scarred? Will he grow up wishing he was blonde? Will he grow up thinking that his wife must do all the cooking and that he must wear a hat to work? Will he talk like Dick and Jane? Will he say to his wife, “Cook, wife. Cook.” Will he make his daughter think she can’t jump?

I worry as Victor reads. Even so, every word rings of sweetness. One more angel getting his reading wings.

Worry, Jan. Worry.

Read, Victor. Read.

Love. Love. Love.

Filed Under: balance, complex text, Foundational Skills, Implementation, text selection, Uncategorized

Them’s Fightin’ Words

May 8, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 3 Comments

When one thinks of the divisions in education or of the reasons educators bicker over pedagogical issues, we are hard pressed to come up with a more contentious topic than that of phonics instruction. No Child Left Behind placed explicit phonics instruction front and center. In contrast, the authors of the Common Core State Standards have treated instruction in the code as something of a stepchild. There is relatively limited discussion of how to teach how the written code works, presumably because this topic is so divisive. Say what you will about the Common Core authors, but for better or for worse, they were out to get things done, not get into debates, including the traditional debates over phonics.

We presume that Foundational Skills, the portion of the Common Core which addresses teaching how words work, are not included in the anchor standards because there are only four of them and they are not consistent through the grades. For the most part, the Common Core’s Foundational Skills’ anchor-ish standards seem to make room for the factions divided over how to teach the code, giving either extreme room to do what they want. That is, if systematic, explicit phonics instruction in the extreme, perhaps even that which is scripted, is your cup of tea, then nothing in the Common Core will stop you from teaching phonics this way. You will have to pay careful attention to meaning work, including read aloud and interactions with texts of substance, which tends to be neglected in such instruction, whether you want to admit it or not. What the Common Core doesn’t do, which seems to be making people angry, is say that everyone MUST teach this way.

If on the other hand, you prefer to teach word work in ways that are embedded in interactions with text that you feel are more authentic, or if you feel that children can learn the code in ways that are more holistic, then the Common Core won’t get in your way, either. You will have to work hard to get children to attend to the print and you will have to be systematic in your own right, as attention to the code is typically lacking in classrooms that take such an approach to an extreme. What the Common Core doesn’t do is say that children MUST learn to read in “authentic” texts, and this is making some other people angry.

As with the Common Core, you may notice that we are taking both sides of this issue. We don’t think there should be a fight. In both instructional philosophies, those teachers on either extreme, as well as those along the continuum between either extreme, will have to pay close attention to the truth of the criticisms lodged against them, instead of simply choosing to be angry. If you think there are no holes in your instructional philosophy, if you think you have the ONE right way to teach children to read, if you are angry because people don’t know everything you know, then take a deep breath, shut up, and listen for a change. Children can learn to read in either classroom setting, just as children can fail to read in either classroom setting. The success of the children has more to do with the quality of the teachers than with the philosophy of instruction, and we are all lucky if we have honest critics who can help us see what we are inclined to overlook.

Filed Under: balance, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Foundational Skills, Growth Mindset, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Planning for Instruction, Reading Tagged With: CCSS, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, critical thinking, Reading

What Color is Your Library?

Library Power: Organizing Books

Four Advantages to “Real Books” Over E-books

Thursday Thought: Who’s Doing the Work

Building Background Knowledge: Harnessing the Power of the Internet

Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?

The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences

Weekend Round Up May 10

To Be Decodable or Not to Be Decodable

Them’s Fightin’ Words

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