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Helping Students Become Active Thinkers, Part 1
The ultimate goal of all writing instruction has to be to help students become active thinkers while they are independently writing. This is the foundation of my writing beliefs. We need to teach writing in a way that will allow students, when they are sitting alone with a blank paper or computer screen in front…
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Gallagher Builds a Lifelong Desire to Read and Write
What is in the best interest of our students? Is it teaching to the newest standards movement, like the Common Core? Teaching that prepares students to take a test? Or is it something more meaningful and authentic? Something more enduring? Kelly Gallagher will be at Kent ISD on March 23rd to present Core Values to…
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How to Build Complexity to Foster Critical Thinking
Teachers work tirelessly to help students achieve success. There are so many teachers that are dedicated to their profession. We appreciate the determination and drive that teachers exhibit when working with our children. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the amazing teachers were recognized for their passion? Unfortunately, there can only be one
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Purposeful Annotation: A Close Reading Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students
When I first started writing about close reading, I was doing what a lot of people did at the time, and still do: I essentially used the phrase “close reading” instead of the term annotation. Unfortunately, it took me about a year to realize
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Teachers Learn to Spark Pizzazz into Student Writing
“When students talk about their ideas for writing, they often exhibit spark, personality, and pizzazz, expressing interesting ideas fearlessly and creatively. Yet the writing they submit lacks this same enthusiasm and originality. They have the ideas, but what happens between that talk and the written draft?” (Anderson, Jeff, and Deborah Dean. Revision Decisions: Talking through Sentences…