Your own literate life is essential. Workshop teachers need to read and write, in and out of our comfort zones, and we need to read and write a lot. Our literate lives are the backbone of our teaching. What I’m reading and writing today will likely find its way into my classroom tomorrow—as a mentor…
Yesterday, something magical happened in my Children’s Literature course for pre-service elementary teachers. My phone had ticked down from 18 minutes, and the bell began to chime, signaling the end of our reading time. I slid my finger over the alarm to turn it off, tucked an index card into my book to mark the…
My first session of the final day of NCTE was Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose: Helping Students Craft a Clear and Heartfelt Vision for Their Learning with Kate Roberts and Maggie Beattie Roberts. It was hard to say no to a presentation titled after Friday Night Lights (Coach Taylor!), but the real inspiration to…
Yesterday, I got a text from one of my pre-service teachers who will be attending NCTE with me next week: “How in the world are we supposed to pick sessions?! I’m currently signed up to attend 26 sessions from 9:30-12:15 on Friday according to my app. Whoops!” I think all of us who have been…
I wanted to be so many different things. Bus driver. Doctor. Paleontologist. Archaeologist. Librarian. Actress. Writer. Art historian. World traveler. Biographer. Bookstore owner. Innkeeper. Never teacher. I played school with my cousins, but Kelly always got to be the teacher because she was the oldest. I was cast as the teacher in the second-grade play.…
Photo CC-By Bob I’m a relentless tinkerer in my classes and rarely start a semester the same way twice. But there is one thing I do on the first day of Children’s Literature that never changes. I show this video of third-grade teacher Colby Sharp on his first day of school: This video is absolute…
Ruth Ayres hosts a weekly celebration at her blog, Ruth Ayres Writes. I appreciate this invitation to reflect on the positives of my week. This week, the juniors and seniors enrolled in my upper-division Creative Mind class received an unusual homework assignment: color. I try to make it feel a little more like college by…
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…
I am unexpectedly guesting in another professor’s classroom for a couple of weeks, teaching Macbeth. On my second day, we’re talking setting, and I ask students what a heath looks like. They stare at me and say nothing. Not sure if they’re quiet because they don’t know what a heath looks like or if it’s because…
