The Stenhouse Blog

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.)

Meaningful uses of technology can change how you teach and how your students learn. But many teachers struggle with finding ways to incorporate digital tools and texts into their instruction in a way that is focused while also inspiring curiosity. Thankfully, Julie Coiro has created a framework called Personal Digital Inquiry (PDI) that will help you integrate purposeful uses of technology into a classroom culture that values inquiry and deep learning.