Category: Uncategorized
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A Guide to Helping Students See Themselves As Writers
There exists a vast catalog of books that discuss the sad truth that far too many students come into our classes each year holding attitudes towards reading that range from agnostic to downright antagonistic. From The Book Whisperer to Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys to Book Love to the upcoming book I Hate Reading, there…
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Why Building Classroom Community Will Be So Important This Year (and How to Do It)
There isn’t much debate about the fact that teachers as a whole are struggling right now. Any education-focused site one views will likely be awash with articles about teachers leaving the profession, thinking about leaving the profession, or struggling in a multitude of ways. The same basic theme has saturated social media thus far this…
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My Six Books of the Summer
A few weeks ago one of my co-author’s of the new book Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Teaching Middle and High School ELA, Dave Stuart Jr., offered a challenge on his blog: What if we approached resting this summer with a purposefulness and intensity normally reserved for home improvement projects or planning an epic…
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An Argument for Elevating Joy Right Now
A couple weeks ago, a colleague of mine asked us a simple question at a department meeting: What are you doing to make learning fun right now? The fifteen or so of us in the room furrowed our brows and lowered our eyes until he bailed us out by admitting that he asked the question…
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Learning to Transfer: A Discussion with Trevor Aleo
For my post today, I interview Trevor Aleo, a middle school English teacher and curriculum designer from Wilton, Connecticut, and a co-author of the wonderful book Learning that Transfers. Trevor is the English lead for Team LTT and an expert in all things transfer–an area of study that has helped my teaching greatly, especially in…
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How I’m Trying to Do More With Less Part 3: Finding Places to Let the Students Lead
Early in his book Writing Unbound, Thomas Newkirk implores his readers to “[Not] Talk So Much” by saying the following: “Deep in our DNA there must be some image of teaching where we are talking–instructing, giving directions, up front. Just walk past about any class. Studies of teacher lessons affirm that there is a deeply…
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4 Essential Studies: An Interview with Penny Kittle
Given how overwhelmed and overloaded many educators are right now, my posts since the new year have focused on teaching practices and pedagogical approaches that allow us to maintain or even improve the quality of our teaching while also trimming down the time we are spending on it. In that spirit, getting weekly or even…
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How I’m Trying to Do More With Less in 2022: Part I
A RAND study from this last year confirmed what many teachers already know: that teacher workload spiked in the spring of 2020 and for many hasn’t stopped spiking since. Specifically, the study found that teachers have settled into working 6 hours more per week on average since the spring of 2020 and nearly 25% of teachers…
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Building Connections in a Disconnected Fall Through Micro-Sharing of Student Writing
This is the second post in a short series on small but fierce tools that can boost your writing instruction in the matter of a few minutes. For the original entry, click here. For me at least, the last 18 months haven’t exactly been the ideal in regards to professional development. I have read far…
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A Little But Fierce Feedback Trick: Letting Students Start the Conversation
A Note from Matt: T.S. Eliot once said that April is the cruelest month. With respect to him, from a teaching perspective I find that this moniker likely belongs to October instead. What makes October a sometimes cruel month is in part its busyness, with its parent/teacher conferences, curriculum nights, and piles of letters of…
Matthew M. Johnson 