The Stenhouse Blog

"Open Middle Math celebrates that the journey we bring students on in our classroom matters more than the destination.” –Sara Van Der Werf, VanDerWerf Educational Consulting

Recently, we sat down with Robert Kaplinsky to talk about his new book, Open Middle Math: Problems That Unlock Student Thinking, Grades 6–12. Find out how Open Middle math problems can transform your middle and high school math class.

Find out what Stephanie Harvey had to say about the new book by Julie Coiro, Elizabeth Dobler, and Karen Pelekis, From Curiosity to Deeper Learning: Personal Digital Inquiry in Grades K–5.

We recently sat down to talk with Katie Egan Cunningham about her new book coming in September, Start with Joy. Find out why she wrote it and how it can help you bring joy into your literacy instruction.

Below is a guest blog post from Ruth Culham, author of Teach Writing Well.

I’ve found that one of the things teachers like least about teaching writing is the paper load. It’s true—when you teach writing well, students write often. When students write often, as they should, they produce many papers to read and respond to. When they produce many papers, sometimes teachers reduce the amount of time they give students to write to save paper. It’s a Catch-22. Students can’t get better without practice, yet the practice swamps even the most dedicated writing teacher.

Below is a guest blog from Amy Stewart, author of Little Readers, Big Thinkers.

“Reading is a gift we give our students. It is a gift wrapped in compelling characters, wondrous words, and incredible information. Close reading is a way to bring those characters, words, and pieces of information to life in new, joyful ways for our students.”

Below is a guest blog from author and math expert, Marian Small. Her new book, Understanding the Math We Teach and How to Teach It is now available for preorder.

Lots of elementary teachers were not privileged to receive math instruction that built their confidence in math. As a consequence, many of these teachers feel discomfort and stress as they try to teach math in a more meaningful way to their students. They worry! What if they say the wrong thing? What if the students ask them to explain something and they can’t? What if the students say something, and they’re not sure if they are right or wrong? If you are one of the people with those feelings, you are not alone. For so long, math was taught by many as a set of rules without any attempt to make those rules make sense, and many of our teachers are products of that system.

If you are familiar with Choral Counting & Counting Collections by Megan L. Franke, Elham Kazemi, and Angela Chan Turrou, then you know that Choral Counting is a fun, engaging instructional activity designed to leverage children’s mathematical thinking as they work together to count and dig into a variety of number sequences. Did you know, however, there is a Choral Counting Tool to help you plan out your counts?

The following is a guest blog from Jeff Zwiers, author of the upcoming book, Next Steps with Academic Conversations, the follow-up resource to his popular, Academic Conversations.

Academic conversations are powerful ways to develop students’ content, language, cognition, agency, and socioemotional skills. However, students’ academic conversations vary widely and wildly, as do the teacher strategies for fostering them. Conversations can be short with long turns, long with short turns, shallow, deep, focused, unfocused, etc. For these reasons I have spent the last decade working with teachers on developing a better understanding of classroom conversations and how they can be best cultivated across grade levels and disciplines. I have included a brief synopsis of some of the most salient learnings from this work. (See my Next Steps with Academic Conversations book for a more complete description of these ideas.)

You might have a few or a lot of Stenhouse books on your bookshelf, but did you know that we have a treasure trove of free material on our website and social channels? Here are just a few. Go to Stenhouse.com to see even more!