DORA on Pennsylvania RtI List
0 Comments Posted Thursday, June 30, 2011
Reducing the Summer Slump: Some Tips and Ideas
It seems the only way to truly avoid the summer slump is to include in a lazy summer day some extensive, monitored, and challenging practice in reading and mathematics.
0 Comments Posted Friday, July 16, 2010
The Gold Standard of RtI Implementation
Discovering the best way to implement RtI in your school or district
5 Comments Posted Friday, September 19, 2008
Out of Control
It's bad enough that children are increasingly losing control over their personal opinions and insights for the sake of making the right scores on high-stakes tests. It's awful when they become ill over it--when it's not about educating children as much as it is about controlling them.
2 Comments Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The End of Print as We Know It?
As far as reading goes, while I still read books, I now spend copious amounts of time reading material on the Internet - much more than I do reading from the pages of reference books or magazines. It's amazing to me that in fewer than a dozen years of my life, my experience of text has changed so drastically that now much of it happens electronically.
2 Comments Posted Friday, March 14, 2008
Let’s Go Learn Co-Founder Featured in District Administration Article
District Administration has released an article highlighting the need for diagnostic assessment in the classroom. Featured in their article is Dr. Richard McCallum, co-founder of Let's Go Learn.
0 Comments Posted Friday, March 07, 2008
Response to Intervention: What You Need to Know
Whatever your political leanings may be, you can probably see the argument that NCLB has in many ways been good for low-achieving students. Titles 1 & 3, among others, have channeled funds directly toward students who need help, whether during the day or after school. An outgrowth of the focus on low-achieving kids has been a movement to systematize and structure the types of interventions schools offer for such students. This process has been codified in what is termed "Response to Intervention," or RtI.
4 Comments Posted Friday, February 15, 2008
Alternate Materials: Engaging the Reluctant Reader
When it comes down to it, whether our kids are reading "the classics" or Sports Illustrated for Kids shouldn't be our greatest concern. Really, the question is whether they are reading at all. And if we can find materials to engage them, they will!
1 Comments Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Freedom Writers
As I see it, when kids truly want to learn something - especially from curricula that encourage them to deal with real life issues like race and violence, while helping them develop strong enough literacy skills to make it to college - we do them more of a disservice by not allowing them to explore those materials.
0 Comments Posted Monday, February 04, 2008
Should Reading Be So Hard?
With the drudgery of some reading programs which employ rote tasks that aren't applicable to authentic and meaningful textual experiences, I fear that we make reading much harder for kids than it should be...
0 Comments Posted Friday, January 25, 2008
Speaking Out Against Graduation Exams
Educators and school board members alike are speaking out against the proposed graduation exam requirements in Pennsylvania. With the number of benchmark assessments on the rise across the country, there are many who feel that assessments are the only way to hold both teachers and students accountable for their learning. But in Pennsylvania, they disagree.
0 Comments Posted Tuesday, January 22, 2008
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a….Reading Teacher?!
According to a New York Times article, "Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors," the Maryland State Department of Education is planning on expanding a literacy program which employs comic books as part of its curriculum after seeing positive results in a pilot program...
2 Comments Posted Tuesday, January 08, 2008