Visit Ruth Ayres’s blog to join the weekly celebration.
This week, I’m borrowing Mary Lee Hahn’s clever format for her reflection on her experiences at #NCTE15–organized into Top Ten lists–as the format for my own celebration of all of the learning, thinking, vessel-righting, talking, and bookish goodness that is NCTE.
Top 10 Quotations
Top 10 Authors and Illustrators I Heard Speak at NCTE
Jason Reynolds
Erin Stead
Phillip Stead
Allison Bechdel
Kadir Nelson
Dave Eggers
Marquin Parks
Tim Federle
Cynthia Lord
Lynda Mulally Hunt
Top 10+1 Most Surprising or Thought-Provoking Ideas from NCTE
Book clubs sparked more reading in reluctant readers than independent reading. (Kelly Gallagher)
Young people’s music is an archive of their adolescence. Novels can also be literary documentation of a generation’s youth. (Jason Reynolds)
Studies show that the benefits of literacy work come through talk—before, during, after reading. (Linda Pavonetti)
Those 50% of new teachers who leave teaching within 5 years include the very top most effective teachers as well as the least effective teachers. (Chris Lehmann)
Books for kids are designed for kids to read and complete, to enter into imaginatively via gaps where not everything is explained. Books at kids are designed to teach lessons and connect all the dots and kids will rebel. (Phillip Stead)
Students who hate reading hate the comparison of themselves to other readers. (Justin Stygles)
When we give kids positive notes about themselves, we need to give them space to take that note off somewhere safe and private and read it when and where they can really absorb the message safely. (Lynda Mulally Hunt)
Can students implement feedback on writing elements that we haven’t had time to teach? (Jeff Scheur)
We like to stand on things that are concrete in the classroom (graphic organizers, bulletin boards). (Sarah Brown Wessling)
What happens when we accept, validate, embrace our students’ rebellion? (Dave Eggers)
We need to ask tough questions about what is essential in our classrooms vs what’s important vs what’s nice to know—and make sure we’re concentrating on what’s essential, not what’s nice to know. It’s easy to get distracted by what’s nice to know. (Penny Kittle)
Top 10 Books I Now Want to Read Because of NCTE
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell
Mixed Me! by Taye Diggs, illustrated by Shane Evans
Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina
Zach Delacruz: Me and My Big Mouth by Jeff Anderson
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brenda Kiely
Write What Matters: For Yourself, For Others by Tom Romano
Why’d They Wear That?: Fashion as the Mirror of History by Sarah Albee
Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark
Red by Liesl Shurtliff
Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton by Don Tate
the dirigible plum 
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