Teacher's Corner

Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca sat down with us recently to answer questions that came in from Patterns of Power Facebook Community members. If you already use these resources for your grammar instruction, you might learn some helpful, new tips. And if you're less familiar with Jeff and Whitney's work—listen in to find how you can use it to bridge the gap between your reading and writing instruction.

Kassia Wedekind and Allison Hintz share what they've learned from a recent project they worked on together about the importance of listening in the classroom. They'll share their stories, their research, tips and tools to help your students become better listeners, as well as ways teachers can become better listeners too.

Longtime friends and colleagues Gravity Goldberg and Renee Houser reflect on the journey that led them to create the Teacher's Toolkit for Independent Reading, a comprehensive collection of resources for grades 3, 4, and 5 that will give teachers everything they need to confer with confidence.

Our latest episode of Teacher's Corner features a fantastic conversation between Graham Fletcher and Tracy Zager about the development of the Fact Fluency Toolkit, available in 2020.

Today's Teachers Corner features Trevor reading the Introduction from The Art of Comprehension.

In The Art of Comprehension, Trevor introduces his signature method for enhancing students' understanding and thinking about all texts—both written and visual. By using what he calls "access lenses" (such as faces, body language, sound/silence) you can prompt all your students to become active explorers and meaning-makers, which in turn can make your classroom more student-centered.

To learn more, check out The Art of Comprehension at https://www.stenhouse.com/1168.asp

Using number talks in your math instruction will not only create number sense, but also transform how a teacher teaches and a student learns. This episode features Ruth Parker and Cathy Humphreys sharing how what they learned about writing Making Number Talk Matter and Digging Deeper can help you in your math instruction.

Welcome to the final episode of this season of our Mentoring New Teachers podcast!

In this episode, I offer Laura some advice about how to incorporate strategies for helping her students learn and retain sight words into her instructional routine. As many teachers who work with our youngest students know, it can be enormously difficult to balance phonics work and word play with opportunities to listen to and read connected text--not to mention everything else that teachers must juggle within what often seems like a few short hours! Because this is our final "formal" conversation for the podcast, Laura and I also reflect on this unique experience and the many ways in which it has impacted our work as educators.

Laura shares how her mid-year literacy assessments led her to conclude that she needs to invest more time in helping her kindergarten students to practice decoding and encoding words. We discuss how to do this by modifying some of what she already does with her students, and I also suggest some ways to incorporate additional multisensory work with letters and sounds to help students create even more neural pathways in the brain than they've already created over the past several months.

Finally, I share with Laura some common missteps that many teachers make--myself included!--when working to help students become more independent readers and writers. A tip: you may want to listen to this episode in small chunks--there's a lot to absorb!

In our premiere episode, Terry Thompson, Paula Bourque, Brett Eberly, and Matthew R. Kay discuss how they prepare their classrooms for success at the start of the school year.