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I struggle to answer the question - “what do you do for a living?” The easy response is that I am a teacher, but that never seems to capture the real essence of what my day to day experience is. When I tell people that I teach, I usually get a response along the lines of, “oh man, you must have...

In the last post , we focused on five areas to consider in developing a school-wide vision for literacy: establishing literacy as a priority, creating a sense of collective responsibility for all children, ensuring evidence-based, high quality literacy instruction, establishing a balanced system of...

Leading Literacy - Developing a School-Wide Literacy Vision We hope you enjoy the first of a four part series on Literacy Leaders The first question I ask when I work with teachers and leaders around literacy practices is what is your school-wide vision for literacy instruction? I typically receive...

Mini-Series: Honoring and Leveraging Students’ Home Languages in the Classroom This is the third blog in the mini-series “Honoring and Leveraging Students’ Home Languages in the Classroom.” In this post, I consider why it matters for students to encounter books that represent their lived experiences...

This is the second blog in the mini-series “Honoring and Leveraging Students’ Home Languages in the Classroom.” In this blog, I introduce language and culture portraits as a method for learning about and affirming students’ diverse linguistic and cultural identities. Language and Culture Portraits...

This is the first blog in the mini-series “Honoring and Leveraging Students’ Home Languages in the Classroom.” In this blog, I introduce some core concepts underscoring the importance of cultivating multilingual classroom spaces. I Am My Language "So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about...

In my post series about text sets , I’ve outlined research on text sets from cognitive , disciplinary , and critical perspectives. Each of these perspectives offers specific aims for what a literacy unit’s texts might look like. But how might a teacher bring them together? How can a teacher aim for...

Just what is a text set , anyways? Turns out, a teacher’s text set depends a lot on their perspective on literacy. In this blog post series, I’ve described the QTS text set from the cognitive perspective and the Project READI text set from the disciplinary literacy perspective . To complement those...