Neurologists at the University of Indiana found more advanced neural activity in children when they wrote by hand as opposed to typing. An educational psychologist at the University of Washington found that 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders in a study there “expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus using a keyboard to compose.”
This is contrary to upcoming online writing assessments.
emphasizes the importance of taking one’s time by making a connection between writing and drawing: before her students even start writing, she asks them to take fifteen minutes or so to make a sketch of the scene they want to create. When they are done, she has them list all of the sensory details in the picture.
Stragegies we use with developing writers...used by a college professor!
you are creating the containers where you will eventually do your thinking. If you are just thinking, on a screen, where you can write so fast and erase so fast, it’s kind of like Frost’s thing of playing tennis without a net.”
“getting your mind on the page, without the interference of the editor, the fake voices, the cleaner-upper, the conformist.”
Sellers believes writing by hand can improve literacy by deepening students’ engagement with word and world.
They have to do the handwriting thing for thirty minutes a day for thirty days. For many of them, it’s the only time in the day they are alone. It’s a form of meditation, right? To sit with oneself and discover what’s in there. Writing by hand, then, is a great way, of creating a conversation with oneself. That’s vital for the first year writer—maybe the most vital thing.”
“And I’m not sure writing by hand is right for every teacher, every writer, every classroom. I just want to make sure we don’t lose methods that really work.”
"The mission of the Michigan Assessment Consortium is to improve student learning and achievement through a system of coherent curriculum, balanced assessment and effective instruction. We do this by collaboratively Promoting assessment knowledge and practice.Providing professional development.Producing and sharing assessment tools and products."
Includes resources and archived videoconferences
research has demonstrated that access to self-selected texts improves students' reading performance (Krashen, 2011), whereas no evidence indicates that workbooks, photocopies, or computer tutorial programs have ever done so
If school principals eliminated the budget for workbooks and worksheets and instead spent the money on real books for classroom libraries, this decision could dramatically improve students' opportunities to become better readers.
Studies of exemplary elementary teachers further support the finding that more authentic reading develops better readers
struggling readers typically encounter a steady diet of too-challenging texts throughout the school day
remediation that emphasizes comprehension can change the structure of struggling students' brains.
to enable the brain to develop the ability to read: It takes lots of reading and rereading of text that students find engaging and comprehensible.
he intensity and volume of high-success reading, that determines a student's progress in learning to read
exemplary teachers were more likely to differentiate instruction so that all readers had books they could actually read accurately, fluently, and with understanding.
Writing provides a different modality within which to practice the skills and strategies of reading for an authentic purpose.
Time for students to talk about their reading and writing is perhaps one of the most underused, yet easy-to-implement, elements of instruction
Research has demonstrated that conversation with peers improves comprehension and engagement with texts in a variety of settings
better outcomes when kids simply talked with a peer about what they read than when they spent the same amount of class time highlighting important information after reading
When students write about something they care about, they use conventions of spelling and grammar because it matters to them that their ideas are communicated, not because they will lose points or see red ink if they don't
This high-impact, low-input strategy is another underused component of the kind of instruction that supports readers
simply requires a decision to use class time more effectively.
eliminate almost all worksheets and workbooks
ban test-preparation activities and materials from the school day
no studies demonstrating that engaging students in test prep ever improved their reading proficiency—or even their test performance
visual teaching tools
that foster and encourage lifelong learning. They are based on a simple
yet profound insight: The one common instructional thread that binds
together all teachers, from pre-kindergarten through postgraduate, is
that they all teach the same thought processes.
"Thinking Maps, developed by Dr. David Hyerle, are visual teaching tools that foster and encourage lifelong learning. They are based on a simple yet profound insight: The one common instructional thread that binds together all teachers, from pre-kindergarten through postgraduate, is that they all teach the same thought processes."
aspects of our strategy instruction may well be counterproductive. I sense that we may overemphasize things like making connections and predictions and underemphasize things like synthesis and determining importance.
I re-read this (highlighted) passage from the article about 3 times to absorb it. When I first became a literacy coach about 10 years ago, our district was just transitioning to the idea of leveled text and guided reading. It was all about giving struggling readers text at their instructional level--easier to access. Now the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) necessitate a shift in that thinking as we need to push students to interact with more complex texts at a higher level of thinking. So I think we can still consider instructional levels (and need to) to help students become proficient readers, but we need to "up the ante" in our book talks to help students go deeper into the meaning.
Reading is more than looking at the words on a page. Critical reading involves re-reading text to "dentify patterns of elements -- information, values, assumptions, and language usage-- throughout the discussion. These elements are tied together in an interpretation, an assertion of an underlying meaning of the text as a whole."