We just posted a preview clip from Mark Overmeyer’s upcoming video How Can I Support You? Strategies for Effective Writing Conferences. In his new video you can watch Mark as he conducts six individual writing conferences and one group conference with students in grades three and five. Mark describes how he uses conferences to meet the needs of all writers, including beginning English language learners, advanced students, and students who struggle to develop their ideas. A bonus section includes a peer conference with Mark’s comments about how to help students support each other.
Gardening rather than agriculture is the analogy for education.
—Lawrence Stenhouse
For many years, teachers have criticized education research for not being relevant to their needs, or for being written in a way that fails to connect with classroom practice. Teacher research—an extension of everyday teacher inquiry and reflective practice—starts with a pressing question or problem, and the solution can produce immediate benefits in the classroom.
Thoroughly revised and expanded, the second edition of Living the Questions takes you step-by-step through designing and implementing research projects that inform instruction. Presenting a variety of rich examples of real projects from teachers across the country, Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Power help you hone your inquiry skills and better understand your students, while developing your own community of researchers.
The new edition incorporates new technologies for conducting research, analysis, and sharing/networking; offers more short examples from a greater diversity of teacher-researchers; and provides many more research designs.
Living the Questions will inspire you to take the leap into a rewarding and fulfilling process of discovery. Preview the entire text online!
We just posted our exciting lineup of new books and videos for spring 2012! Several of these books are already available to order, the rest will be arriving in our warehouse soon.
Setting up a website and blog was something we have wanted to do for a long time. We have met so many wonderful teachers in the past few years that have come to our conference presentations or workshops in schools and who asked for ways to keep in touch with us. So, with a little help from colleague Kate Tiedeken, we have taken the dive into technology.
At the heart of Mentor Texts with Lynne and Rose (www.mentortextswithlynneandrose.com) is our blog. Each of us has a separate blog space where we can share our thinking on a variety of topics and let readers in on our current personal and professional experiences. We hope this space will help us dialogue with teachers to share ideas and reflections.
Two of the most popular features of our books, the Your Turn lessons and the Treasure Chest of Books, are also a part of our site. In Books Too Good to Miss we will be reviewing new books we come across and discussing how they might be used for writing or reading lessons. Of course, new books (and even some old ones we look at with new eyes) lead to new writing lessons that we will share with our readers as well. From time to time we will also review professional books on the teaching of writing or reading.
From time to time we will also give readers a glimpse into our writing notebooks – memories that are sparked, writing we are trying out, thinking we are engaging in or reflecting on. Hopefully, our writing will spark an idea or thought that our readers can write from or try out themselves.
We hope you will visit our site to gain practical tips for writing workshop and be encouraged to write in your own notebooks. Teachers of writers are teachers who write. Please join us in our conversations!
A child asks a question. Do we answer it? If so, how? How long do we wait before we answer it? If not, what do we say? A child successfully accomplishes something—or fails to. We have another opportunity to say something, but what? My intention with this book is to offer a basis for choosing more productive talk—how to make the most of those opportunities children offer us.
Expanding on the ideas in his groundbreaking book Choice Words, Peter Johnston explores the lasting impact that subtle differences in teacher language can have on children and their view of the world in his new book, Opening Minds. You’ll discover how your words can:
encourage students to view their abilities and traits as dynamic and malleable rather than hopelessly fixed;
portray change, mistakes, uncertainty, and disagreement as a normal part of learning and accomplishment;
invite conversations that are focused on problem-solving and learning processes;
create a classroom culture of feedback that avoids the pitfalls of personal praise and judgment;
encourage classroom dialogue and collaborative inquiry through engaging questions;
enhance social imagination and moral development.
Filled with concrete examples, Opening Minds will change the way you think about talk in your classroom and guide you toward more effective interactions with students. It’s available now, and you can preview the entire book online.
- Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli, authors of Mentor Texts and Nonfiction Mentor Texts, used their winter vacation wisely and set up a new website and blog. At Mentor Texts with Lynne & Rose you can find information about their books, upcoming presentations, a link to their blog, and a peek inside their writer’s notebook.
- If you are an EdWeek Book Club member, you probably already received information about the upcoming book club discussion of Kelly Gallagher’s new title, Write Like This. Here is some information about the book and details of the discussion. It’s not too late to sign up!
- Are you a book nerd? It’s OK! We all are! So check out this new blog started by Donalyn Miller, book whisperer extraordinaire, along with teachers Colby Sharp and Cindy Minnich. But the blog includes contributions from many, many like-minded readers, teachers, writers — all book nerds, just like you!
- If you have a bit of a notebook obsession — collecting them, writing in them, smelling their pages — head over to Ruth Ayres’ blog Ruth Ayres Writes where you can watch a fun video she put together of all of her notebooks. (Ruth is the coauthor of Day by Day.) What does your notebook look like? Did you start a new one with the new year?
Following the same format as his previous book, What Every Elementary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests, Charles provides a host of strategies and activities for mastering test items across all of the commonly assessed reading standards. He demonstrates how students can learn the language of tests and apply their knowledge on test day.
This is a resource that you’ll turn to again and again as you integrate test prep into everyday reading work, enhancing your teaching of vocabulary development, literary techniques, interpretation, comprehension, and more. It’s available now, and you can preview the whole book online.
We begin 2012 in very good company: As the first blog post of the year, Teri Lesesne shares her new year’s resolutions for staying active as a reader and writer. To mark this occasion, we are offering a special package of Teri’s two books, Making the Match and Naked Reading at a special price. Check out the package here and then visit us again in February and March, when Teri will talk about her LOVE of reading and will lead us in a MARCH into books.
So tell us, what is your new year’s resolution when it comes to reading and writing?
New Year, New Goals
I am a list maker. There is something satisfying about making that list and then checking items off as they are completed. Of course, no list is ever complete; it simply morphs into a new list. As the new year opens, my first list centers on some New Year’s Resolutions. My professional goals are simple and to the point. I resolve to read more and to write more. Now, for the tough part: how to accomplish these goals?
Reading More
Set aside the time: As I wait for the coffee to finish brewing in the morning, I sit down with a book. Generally, I can read a chapter before coffee is ready. Sometimes I manage a few more pages as I sip that first cup. In fifteen minutes a day, a person can read an average of more than a million words a year or about 20 books. If you are a commuter, add audiobooks to your drive time. Make sure your devices have books loaded for that time when you are kept waiting somewhere.
Join a reading community: Paul W. Hankins, a high school English teacher in Indiana formed a Facebook group a couple of years ago. Those of us who joined the community pledged to read 100 books that year. We posted our progress monthly. This was sort of like a support group for us all. It kept us on track. So, gather a few colleagues around you who will join in your resolution to read more.
Make a realistic goal: My personal reading goal each year is to read one more book than I read the year before. So, if you have been dormant for a while, start small. If 100 books seems daunting, settle on a number that is realistic for you and your situation.
Monitor your progress: Goodreads can help you monitor your progress once your goal is set. Once you set up an account, you can enter your reading goal and Goodreads will monitor your progress for you. Basically, I keep an open file on my desktop each month where I enter the titles of the books I have read.
Save for that rainy day: I love a rainy weekend. It provides just the excuse I need to sit and curl up with some books. I have a separate TBR (to be read) stack for those days: books that I want to read in one huge gulp instead of tiny sips. Sometimes I have a big stack of picture books for those rainy days. At an average of 32 pages per book, I can knock out quite a few picture books on a dreary weekend. And I have found there are many picture books that work across the grade levels.
Where does the writing come in? I write daily on my blog. Most of the time I write about the books I am reading. However, from time to time another topic presents itself. My blog is informal and personal. It is also, though, a place to explore ideas and issues that might later evolve into longer pieces of writing. You might opt for a notebook. Even annotating a text by jotting notes and comments in the margins (or using these features with an e-reader) is writing. Readers and writers do not operate in a vacuum; they are part of a larger community. I hope you will join me this new year as I resolve once more to be active in my development as a reader and a writer.
The Stenhouse blog will take a little break until 2012. Thank you for following and commenting all year long. We hope you enjoyed our blog tours, our first ever Summer Writing Blogstitute, and the many videos, articles, and poems we posted throughout the year.
We leave you with the view of Monument Square from our offices in Portland, Maine. Merry Christmas!
In a traditional, teacher-centered algebra class, students sit passively while a teacher demonstrates strategies for solving various problems. Recently, Anne Collins—co-author with Linda Dacey of The Xs and Ys of Algebra—visited two classes where students were actively engaged in solving multi-step problems while teachers were using formative assessment techniques to understand their thinking and monitor their progress. Here’s Anne’s account of her visits:
On a recent visit to a middle school I had the opportunity to attend two different math classes. I walked into one eighth-grade algebra class and was overwhelmed by the buzz of excitement. Some students were working at the board, others were working on individual white boards, while still other heads were bent over the same problem with the students discussing the next steps.
It took me a moment to find the teacher in this busy classroom. I found her standing between two students at the board. She was asking clarifying questions of one student as she tried to understand what he was thinking at a particular point in the solution process. I came to discover that this teacher was using a round-robin exercise with part of her class as a means of determining how proficient her students were with solving multi-step equations. She had organized her class into groups of three and had given each student the numbers one, two, or three. She began by sending student two to the board to record the equation she announced. Student two recorded the equation and solved only the first step. Student three replaced student two at the board to complete the second step, followed by student one. This continued until the problem was solved. The teacher explained to me that by using this round- robin activity she is able to determine at a glance how well each student is able to enter into the solution process and whether or not any students display misconceptions about solving problems.
I asked some students what they thought about going to the board and was pleased to hear Luis say, “I really like going to the board and the fact that I can get help right away if I need it. I can even help my teammates. And B.J. shared his relief that they go to the board because, “I need the extra time practicing and when I work alone I don’t know if I am doing the math correctly but when I go to the board, I get all the help I need from my team mates or my teacher.”
Next I visited another eighth-grade class and found that in this class students were grouped into triads and were trying to solve the problem Is It a Function? Each student had two clues that they had to share orally within their group to answer one question. I listened to one student asking, “What do I need to know about perpendicular lines?” A teammate responded, “I think there is something about the slopes of perpendicular lines but I don’t remember what it is. Why don’t we draw two lines that make a right angle and see what we get.” I was thrilled to hear the questions and see the strategy that this group used to make sense of the problem. Still another group was working on finding the slope of the line they had identified. They had graphed the ordered pairs given in the clues and were working on the equation. I also observed the teacher walking around listening to the groups, stopping to ask questions as she deemed necessary.
These interactive algebra classes are the polar opposites of how traditional algebra classes are run where the teacher shows and explains to students how to manipulate symbols. The students in the classes I visited actually knew what questions they need to ask to deepen their understanding. In both of these classes I was delighted to see students trying to make sense of the algebra on which they were working. These two teachers engage their students in solving rich problems. The collaborative nature of these classes illustrates just how much students can achieve when they are given the opportunities to solve interesting problems which require them to apply the procedural skills they have learned. And the teachers I observed model the positive impact effective formative assessment has on student learning.
On a recent visit to a middle school I had the opportunity to attend two different math classes. I walked into one eighth-grade algebra class and was overwhelmed by the buzz of excitement. Some students were working at the board, others were working on individual white boards, while still other heads were bent over the same problem with the students discussing the next steps.