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"Without a repertoire of reading strategies that can be applied to any text, students are being shortchanged in their education. In order to teach students to read effectively, teachers must be sure that they are not simply suppliers of information on a particular text but also instructors of techniques to build reading skills. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate reading skills lessons into a curriculum."

"What teachers say they really need isn't free food and a once-a-year exercise in flattery. What they want, they say, is for their profession to be respected in a way that accepts educators as experts in their field. They want adequate funding for schools, decent pay, valid assessment, job protections and a true voice in policy making."

"Whole-class novels are the white powdered doughnuts of the education world. We eat them when they are all that's available, but virtually no one would choose them when given other choices like chocolate eclairs, bear claws, or lemon-filled pockets of gooey goodness. No one bites into a white powdered doughnut and rolls back their eyes because of the taste explosion in their mouths. And are there any white powdered doughnuts in existence that are not completely stale? I think not."

"Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here's a sampling from around the country:"

"Empathy is often confused with sympathy, which is a pretty extraordinary error depending on how tightly wound you are about these things (and whose definitions you stand behind). Dr. Brené Brown offers a divisive take on the difference: "Empathy fuels connections, sympathy drives disconnection." Teaching someone to feel what others feel and sit with emotions that aren't their own couldn't be any further from the inherent pattern of academics, which is always decidedly other. Teaching always begins with detachment -- learn this skill or content strand that is now apart from you. Empathy is the opposite -- it starts in the other, and finishes there without leaving. Here's one way to consider it. Without empathy, you're teaching content instead of students. The concept of teachers as primarily responsible for content distribution is a dated one, but even seeking to "engage" students misses the calling of teaching. To teach a child is to miss that child. You must understand them for who they are and where they are, not for what you hope to prepare them for. "Giving knowledge" and "engaging students" in pursuit of pre-selected knowledge are both natural processes of formal education -- and both make empathy hard to come by. So where to start doing something different? How should you "teach it"? How will you know it when you see it?"

"Carrie is a professor at a university. She had asked me how to turn an area of her expertise, secondary school education, into writing that the general public would find rewarding and enjoyable. That's when I began talking about scenes, using her accident as an example of how to approach her work. Almost all creative nonfiction, essays or books, are, fundamentally, collections of small stories - or scenes - that together make one big story."

"In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the state exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department. The exams were some of the first in the nation to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving. Last year, under an easier test, 47 percent of city students passed in English, and 60 percent in math."

"Questions for teachers, parents and students, from an educational psychologist"

"What makes a good essay? And what makes a bad one? Educational consultant Dave Marcus joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to offer his advice by using examples from student submissions including the opening of senior Michele Hau's essay."

"Working within an answers-based education system, and in a culture where questioning may be seen as a sign of weakness, teachers must go out of their way to create conditions conducive to inquiry. Here are some suggestions (based on input from question-friendly teachers, schools, programs, and organizations) on how to encourage more questioning in the classroom and hopefully, beyond it."

"The most frequent cliché I hear regarding educational policy is, "We're doing this for the good of the students." We undoubtedly mean that, but the fact that students are not included in district-wide and school-wide decision making essentially excludes them from expressing what they perceive as "for the good of the students." It should be conventional wisdom that including students directly and empowering them to help shape high school and district policy would be educationally beneficial for both schools and students."

A "Connected Educators Month" in the United States - the rapid rise of Twitter PD - the coming of age of the Personal Learning Network. No question: It's been an historic year for connected professionals, including PLP's extended family of teacher and school leaders.

"We as educators need to concentrate on and share ways to make learning more purposeful and meaningful for our students. We need to develop good reasons for students to learn what we think is important, put more learning in a larger context, help students make connections and develop networks of learning, and provide more opportunities to apply learning. Purpose and meaning can come in very different forms."

"Educator Mia MacMeekin has put together a clear infographic highlighting some of the ways teachers design "personalized" curriculum."

"Below, you'll find a categorized collection of Times articles and Opinion pieces from the 2014-15 academic year about all aspects of higher education - from getting in, to thinking about why you are there, to considering how to fix what's broken. We hope you'll find plenty to discuss. As the school year began last September, Frank Bruni, a Times Op-Ed columnist, issued a challenge to college freshmen to "construct their world from scratch" and seek out people who think differently: Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, yanking students toward unfamiliar horizons and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who and where they already are. And students need to insist on that, taking control of all facets of their college experience and making it as eclectic as possible. We hope some of the pieces below can help."

Arthur Levine has spent much of his career writing about how tough it is for poor minority kids to get into college. But rarely has this widely respected educator and former president of Teachers College at Columbia University written more urgently than in his latest book, Unequal Fortunes.It was a journey that took him back to his childhood in the South Bronx to figure out why he made it and why most kids living there now don't. "My hope is that this book shows this community is isolated not by choice but by circumstance, and I hope that it shows that the community is a dangerous one to live in. It's hard to blame them for conditions like that," Levine says.Unlike so many of Levine's books, Unequal Fortunes is not just about failed institutions and policies. It's more of a plea for readers to peer into poor children's harrowing lives and become advocates for what Levine calls a Schindler's List kind of change - maybe not to save all children but to rescue as many as possible.

Dittrich sent me this article from NPR commenting on how we are leaving behind literature to pursue "practical education"

Sounds like journalism and education have a lot in common?

Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom.