The new “question-of-the-week” is: What is the biggest mistake teachers make in writing instruction, and what should they do instead? We teachers make lots of mistakes in writing instruction. Just ...

An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told me last week that while they are a bright spot in improving reading for the last three years, they still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic ...

Imagine you are in the 8 th grade, working on an argumentative essay regarding “censorship in the libraries.” After writing a first draft, you receive this marginal comment about one of your sentences ...

Common Core State Standards are driving the curriculum and changing the expectations for what teachers and children are expected to do during writing instruction in school. Here are Common Core’s 10 ...

Early in our careers, when we were fresh-faced and idealistic (we still are!) the prepackaged curriculum and the advice of more experienced colleagues was the go-to resource. Largely, we were advised ...

Writing is a deeply personal act. From process to deadlines, no two people approach writing in the exact same way. Take, for instance, environment. While some people prefer to write in complete ...

Novice writers may struggle with conventions of academic writing, good habits and processes for developing academic essays, and/or grammar, mechanics and syntax. Through the directed self-placement ...

Aconceptual model to describe how literacy develops is shown in Figure 1. It shows several key factors that affect learners’ literacy development—the learning context, texts and tools, literacy ...

(This is the last post in a four-part series. You can see Part One here; Part Two here and Part Three here.) The new “question-of-the-week” is: What is the biggest mistake teachers make in writing ...

Mastery of reading requires developing its highly interrelated major component skills: decoding, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. These components are discussed separately below, but they work ...