6 Reasons Why Your Students Need Close Reading

When I think about my goals as a teacher, I think about how I want to empower my students to go out into the world and think for themselves. Creating independent, confident, life-long learners who aren’t afraid to try to new things is really the ultimate dream. But figuring out how best to spend the limited time that I have in class in order to achieve those dreams is not always easy. I have found, over the years, that teaching

How to Make Romeo and Juliet Relevant to Your Students

For most students, Romeo and Juliet is their first experience reading a Shakespeare play, and so it can be a make-it-or-break-it situation. The pressure is on—not only are you expected to get them excited about reading the 500-year-old words in this play, but their time spent with the two tragic teenagers will set the tone for their experience with other Shakespeare plays during their high school career. One of the best ways to insure that your Romeo and Juliet unit

5 Tips for Teaching Before Christmas Break

The weeks before Christmas break are not exactly a teacher’s favorite time of year. Students are tired and restless; some might be excited about their vacation plans, some might be dreading extended time with their dysfunctional families. It’s a challenging time to teach to say the least. But that doesn’t mean that it’s time to throw in the towel and stream endless videos or give students meaningless busywork. It is a good time to try something different, and to get

6 Reasons To Teach With Mentor Texts

Starting a writing unit by examining great examples of the kinds of writing we’ll be doing is one of those ideas that I seem to forget and remember over and over again. Maybe it’s because I rush through writing plans, anxious to get to the assignment so that students can start working. Maybe it’s the effort of looking for good examples. Perhaps it’s the mistake of believing that my explanation is plenty and students shouldn’t need anything more. Or possibly

4 Units to Achieve Back-To-School Goals

As a teacher, you might have just a few goals for the beginning of the school year: set the tone for your classroom; inspire students to work harder; establish rigor and expectations; teach students to think independently. Oh, and don’t forget win over students by showing them how much fun they’ll be having this year, and, when you teach high school, getting to know over 100 new people as fast as possible. Seems simple, right? Every year, I have tried

Why Do Teachers Look For Writing Prompts? (And What They Should Be Looking For Instead)

In doing a little keyword research for my Teachers Pay Teachers products and the guest blog posts that I write in hopes that people will find and buy those products, I have found that an often searched for term is “writing prompts.” I continue to be almost shocked that people just look for writing prompts, without any tie to content or units of study or texts. I don’t think, though, that they are simply looking for someone to give them

Argument Essay Unit: Cellphone Pros and Cons

I have to admit that I resisted teaching a research based argument essay in my ELA classes for over twelve years. Each year, I would “forget” or “not get to it” or “sort of do an assignment that fulfills the requirement.” The requirement, as I understood it, was for students to click around on the internet for a few hours, put some facts together in a new format, and then say where they had gotten that information. It seemed like

14 questions for examining any mentor text

14 Questions for Examining Mentor Texts (Of Any Kind)

Once students are comfortable reading and analyzing mentor texts in order to improve their own writing, it’s nice to be able to let them work through a text independently. Still, they might appreciate some scaffolding or reminders of what to look for. These fourteen questions will work for just about any kind of writing—from cutting edge journalism to revealing personal essays to experimental poetry. For a printable version of this handout that you can use tomorrow as well as

Common Core: 3 Tips For Teaching Challenging Non-Fiction

Common Core: 3 Tips for Teaching With Challenging Non-Fiction

Whether I’m assigning an article about the relationship between a fixed mindset and the Enron scandal or I’m requiring students to read an essay about how basketball, race, and dreams are all intertwined, I have a few common goals when I choose challenging non-fiction to incorporate in my lesson plans. I want students to learn how to deal with difficult vocabulary, how to navigate complex sentence structure sentence structure, and most importantly, I want them to learn how to question

Common Core: Challenging Non-Fiction Texts For All Subject Areas

I admit to feeling resentful when I learned that the new Common Core standards would require teachers to incorporate more challenging non-fiction into their lesson plans. Really? Wasn’t I doing more than enough already? But I have since (reluctantly and grudgingly) found some great articles to use in class. In fact, one of my favorite new lessons revolves around a piece published in the New Yorker about the relationship between the Enron Scandal and fixed mindset. Since I decided to