In this excerpt from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, the authors clearly define the difference between traditional or informational teaching and transformational teaching or the pedagogy of EMPOWERment.
This activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, primes and orients students through discussion of controversial concepts that they will explore in the unit. Students also practice complex processes like making claims, supporting reasoning with evidence, listening and mirroring, summarizing, and addressing opposing viewpoints and reservations to their own thinking.
In this activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, students will use a picture map to walk through the skills of (1) identifying key details and capturing the connections among them in order to (2) identify topics, then (3) identify patterns of key details in order to identify main ideas and make deeper meaning of the text.
This three-level questioning guide from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, moves learners through the levels of literal, inferential, and reflective evaluation and application questions.
Instructional time is a precious commodity, so it’s worth thinking about ways to make transitions as efficient as possible. In this blog post from Every Child Can Write author Melanie Meehan, she explains that, when we teach explicit strategies for transitioning smoothly and efficiently, we unlock more time for instruction.
In this blog post from Pamela Koutrakos, author of Word Study That Sticks and The Word Study That Sticks Companion, she explains that, for word study to be an integral part of your classroom routine, you can't wait until the “perfect time” to get started. Read her tips to going right away.
Teachers can serve as curators of texts in much the same way as museum curators. Julie Wright, author of What Are You Grouping For?, explains how we can make deliberate moves to pique interest, evoke emotion, and urge action in readers. And we can invite our students to be curators, too.
"Whether you are in your first years of teaching (welcome to our rewarding profession!) or, like me, you’re starting the school year for the 34th time, the way you begin matters. We only get one chance to set the tone and establish a shared vision for living and learning together, so let’s make the most of it! With that goal in mind, I’ll offer a few books for read alouds and ideas that you might try as you build relationships on the 'days you begin.'" Read more from The Ramped-Up Read Aloud author Maria Walther on Corwin Connect.
Colleen Cruz, author of Writers Read Better: Nonfiction and Narrative, writes in her Corwin Connect blog: "We know that the students we teach, without the benefit of years or even fully formed pre-frontal cortexes, are particularly vulnerable to being convinced to think, buy, or do any number of things—especially when they see it online or in social media. One of the most effective ways, if not the most effective way to counteract this is by actively teaching students first to write whatever material we want them to read critically."
In this Corwin Connect blog, Laura Robb, author of Read, Talk, Write, offers strong reasons for why your students should lead discussions in the classroom.
Whether you’re a novice or an expert kidwatcher, there are 3 moves you can make to ramp up your observation skills—then take what you observe to make decisions based on who your kids are as full humans. Read more on these 3 moves in Julie Wright's blog on Corwin Connect, based on her book, What Are You Grouping For?.
"You will forever be a character in the story your students will tell. I learned this from our brilliant colleague, Jim Burke; the things we do today will determine which kind of character we will become when the story is told later. Let’s consider for a few minutes how we might use fairy tales to enchant the everyday stories our students live." Read more from Text Structures from Fairy Tales author Gretchen Bernabei on Corwin Connect.