As it often happens, I was looking for one thing (Google’s expansion into creating maps and navigation tools) when I came upon another. I had clicked my way to a story map of the folk tale hero Paul Bunyan. I had followed a link to the Osher Library Map Cartographic Southern Maine University website and soon was down an […]
Colette Bennett
Colette Marie Bennett is the Curriculum Coordinator for English Language Arts, Social Studies, Library Media, and Testing for the West Haven Public School System in West Haven, Connecticut.
Previous to this position, she served as the Chief Academic Officer (7-12) for Regional School System #6 in Litchfield, Connecticut. She has 23 years of teaching experience in English Language Arts from grades 6-12, including electives in journalism, drama, and film studies.
A graduate of the Alternate Route to Certification, Bennett also has a Masters in English from Western Connecticut State University a 6th year in Advanced Teaching and an 092 Administrative Certificate from Sacred Heart University, and graduate credits from the GLSP in Social Studies at Wesleyan University. She holds a Literacy Certification (102) from Sacred Heart University for grades K-12.
She has presented how technology is incorporated in classrooms at the Connecticut Computers in Education Conference (2010, 2012, 2014), the National Council of Teachers Annual Conference (2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), and the Advanced Placement Annual Conference (2011) the Literacy for All Conference (2012), and the ICT for Language Learning in Florence, Italy (2014).
She blogs about education at Used Books in Class: http://usedbookclassroom.wordpress.com/
She tweets at Teachcmb56@twitter.com
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 […]
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 […]
Skilled Writers Get Editors: Student Writers Get ________?
On occasion, I hear a statement that captures how much the classroom differs from the real world. Such was the case at the International Reading Association Conference in Boston (July 9-11, 2016) when literacy consultant Mark Overmeyer noted that in the real world: “Our most skilled writers have editors…the more skilled the writer, the more editors” […]
“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 […]
Educators and “The Bully Pulpit”: Election 2016
“dope” “fat” “stupid” Those are “bullying” words that an educator in a school is trained to listen for and respond to in most states by law. In my State of Connecticut the law is specific and: “Requires that school personnel report, in a timely and responsive manner, incidents of bullying they witness or are aware of to […]
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 […]
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 […]