Posted inInstruction & Curriculum

Relearning and Unlearning Writing in Grades 6-12

To relearn is to “learn something again, as after having forgotten or neglected it,” and after the five-seven weeks of summer break, students may have a fair amount of forgetting. That means teachers will begin each school year focused on student relearning. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was a pioneer in the study of memory and learning which led to his discovery […]

Posted inElementary School

Classroom Organization: When “Q” was the Only Beautiful Thing in the Room

It is summer, and most elementary classroom walls have been laid bare for repainting or for cleaning. Their empty exposure reminds me of a classroom from an earlier age, from my own elementary school. At the risk of dating myself, from grade 3 on up I could count on one singular decorative element….the cursive alphabet that hung over the […]

Posted inCurrent Events in Education

“I Wrote You a Sonnet, Instead” at the Intersection of Hip-Hop and Tragedy

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s gift to high school social studies teachers is Hamilton, his Pulitzer and Tony award winning play.  Using musical theatre, he rescued history from the mind-numbing facts listed in textbooks and gave students an alternative narrative, a hip-hop lens to view the tumult of America’s creation. His gift to English teachers came on Sunday, June 12, during the Tony […]

Posted inLiteracy

The Evolving Creative Non-Fiction

Maybe it has been the influence of the Common Core  State Standards (CCSS) or maybe it has been the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Whatever the reason, one genre has been evolving and gaining popularity with students at all grade levels, and that is the genre of creative nonfiction. Creative non-fiction or the narrative non-fiction genre features the same […]

Posted inCommon Core, Instruction & Curriculum, Literacy

The NAEP Chicken and the Common Core Nonfiction Egg

What came first…the NAEP Chicken or the CCSS Egg? In 2009, there were revisions to the reading content in  the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the “largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.” The revisions increased nonfiction reading. In 2009, the development of the the Common […]