The Stenhouse Blog

We talked with Matthew R. Kay, author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom about the meaning behind the title of his book. Here’s what he had to say.

Below is an excerpt from the new book, From Curiosity to Deep Learning: Personal Digital Inquiry in Grades K–5 by Julie Coiro, Elizabeth Dobler, and Karen Pelekis.

The following is an excerpt from Activate: Deeper Learning Through Movement, Talk, and Flexible Classrooms by Katherine Mills Hernandez on how to incorporate movement into your routine to benefit your students' test-taking.

One way to think about using movement to benefit testing is to consider when and where as opposed to what methods to use. We already know that rigorous cardiovascular movement wakes up the brain, so we need to strategize when and where to do it on testing days. We also know that the greatest benefits are achieved when movement happens before cognitive challenge.

If movement is going to happen before the test is administered, then students should be prepared to do some of this on their own, before arriving at school, since state tests usually begin at the start of the school day. There are also ways to build in brief movement sessions together, before the test begins. 

by Katie Egan Cunningham

I believe what happens in the first weeks of the school year determines how well one’s entire school year will go. Planning classroom routines in advance of the first day of school allows all members of the classroom community to have their social and/or emotional needs met so you can meet students’ academic needs all year long.

You’ve assessed your students. Now what? Did your assessments go into folders for use at conferences with parents? Did you enter the data into an online database? Or did you take those assessments and use them to inform your instruction? Formative assessment is an important goal but it can be daunting to implement if you don’t have a system in place.

The following is an excerpt from the new book by Jeff Zwiers, Next Steps with Academic Conversations: New Ideas for Improving Learning Through Classroom Talk, the follow up to his popular book Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk That Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, released in 2011. This exciting follow-up addition is due to be published in September, 2019.

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.

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.)