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1. WARM-UP/DO-NOW: In their journals, students respond to the following (written on the board prior to class): “Imagine that you are a college admissions counselor. What would you want to know about each of your potential applicants to decide whether or not you should accept them to your college? Create a list of questions.” Students then share their responses. The teacher should write students’ questions on the board under the categories “Academics,” “Extracurricular,” “Career Goals,” “Talents,” “Personal Qualities,” and “Other.”

3. Tell students that they will be writing letters to college admissions counselors to introduce themselves and to persuade the college to admit them. Students refer to the categories and questions from the initial brainstorming exercise and answer each question for themselves. This procedure will serve as pre-writing for the actual letter.

–If you were a college admissions officer, what would you want to know about each of your potential applicants to decide whether or not you should accept them to your college?

The issue is less stuff vs. reading than it is a question of what sorts of and how much of stuff. When stuff dominates instructional time, warning flags should go up.

In less-effective classrooms, there is a lot of stuff going on for which no reliable evidence exists to support their use (e.g., test-preparation workbooks, copying vocabulary definitions from a dictionary, completing after-reading comprehension worksheets).

In these classrooms, lower-achieving students spent their days with books they could successfully read.