In her new book Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: Lessons for Teachers of Literature, author Deborah Appleman relies heavily on the pedagogical metaphor of scaffolding to describe the support we can offer students as they develop as read...
Earlier this month, I had the chance to attend a talk given by Diane Stephens, who was sharing her research on teachers’ attitudes toward literacy coaches in the South Carolina Reading Initiative. While I found value in the entire presentation of he...
In Act 2 of King Lear, the Duke of Cornwall addresses Goneril’s servant, Oswald, by asking him, “What is your difference?” When we teach a challenging text such as a scene from a Shakespearean drama, we know that students will have the best chan...
Last week I saw one of our school’s counselors headed down the hallway with a cash box in hand. Under the very serious pressure of budget cuts in our district, I used my standard coping mechanism—bad attempts at humor—and asked her if she was ta...
I was out of the English classroom during the 2007 and 2008 school years, a time during which I perceived a digital revolution in reading and writing in and out of school settings. Barraged by blogs, wikis, social networking, Twitter, Ning (and a vari...
As teachers of writing, we are acutely aware of how important the presence of an authentic audience can be for students' motivation to write. Though my state’s standards call for students to “write for real or potentially real situations” [empha...