Teaching Text Structure I haven’t always focused on teaching text structure as a reading comprehension and writing skill, but now I will never not teach it. Teaching text structure allows me to teach writing skills and then transfer them directly to reading texts to see how published authors use the skills we are learning while…
Organization as a teacher Our prep time may be limited and interrupted, but you can achieve organization as a teacher. I have not always been that teacher, so how did I do it? At the start of 2025, I developed a new routine for my prep times and waited to see if it would fail…
Grading Period It can be overwhelming to reset for a new grading period, especially if you want to produce high-level reading and writing results. Focus your energy on these 4 tasks. They will make planning and lesson creation a breeze as the time goes on. This can be combined with my back-to-school set-up checklist for…
Literary Examples It’s time to return my classroom to the literary. The literary examples of teaching are the ones I fell in love with first as a student, and then a teacher. Getting lost in a book. Stunning discussions. Laboring in love through drafts of my writing to get every word just right. Right now,…
Analog Classroom Yes, the Internet has informed me that analog is back. People are buying more physical media (or dragging it out of the basement) and setting down their phones (at least for a little while). I anticipate that this trend will continue to spike as AI sorts us into houses. So what does an…
Behind closed doors, my colleagues and I have been asking, “Will AI take over teaching?” ASCD’s March 2026 issue Literacy in the Age of AI on the whole promised a bright future partnering with AI. This sentiment echoes through most district levels. At the risk of being one more person to weigh in on the…
Novel Worksheets Novel worksheets are a common activity when students read a novel together. It can be difficult to create worksheets that actually teach something about novels in general (and the specific novel they’re reading). Why A Whole Class Novel I don’t only teach novels, but a whole class novel has immense value. It allows…
Teaching Complex Text Don’t start from nothing every time you are teaching complex text. Streamline your work with an influential roadmap. How Complex Texts Should Be Utilized in the Classroom According to researchers like Timothy Shanahan, all students should get the opportunity to read complex grade-level text in order to have the best opportunities to…
Why Fluency is Important Many might wonder why fluency is important for high school students, but it is one of those make-or-break skills. The Four Components There are four components to fluent reading. Phrasing and punctuation. Grouping words together in clusters of meaning by phrases, clauses, and punctuation. Expression (prosody). This is the emotion of…
Teaching Sentence Writing Teaching sentence writing is a powerful and under-utilized tool in the secondary classroom. While it won’t cook your dinner for you, teaching sentence writing can help in a variety of ways. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com 1. Students can apply grammar and vocabulary knowledge to sentence writing. Grammar and vocabulary are…
