Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on June 1, 2014, and is being re-posted on March 30, 2019. The reason for the re-posting? In the last two weeks I have received several questions and several requests for speaking engagements focused specifically on what the literacy school day should look like. This entry doesn't propose a particular schedule, but it does provide the key tenets on which to plan a day's lessons. Man, I hate to see so many frustrated teachers. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been hearing from teachers who use Daily 5. They’re mad because I criticized the idea of organizing their ...

  Last week I explained that it makes sense to organize instruction in ways that allots time to learning goals—rather than to instructional activities. It is not that teachers don’t need activities, just that activities don’t have a one-to-one relationship with instructional outcomes. That's why approaches like Daily 5 and CAFE are simplistic and don't have an especially powerful relationship with learning. Those approaches get teachers aimed at particular classroom activities, without sufficient attention to the outcomes.   How should teachers determine which activities to use towards these essential ends? Research.   For example, imagine you required 30 minutes per day for paired reading (an ...

Blast from the Past: First issued May 18, 2014 and reposted on September 24, 2022. These days I'm often asked how I would organize my reading instruction. In this blog entry I provided that kind of description (and I followed it with two more over the subsequent weeks to expand upon those ideas). You can find those blogs by typing How to Organize Daily Instruction into the search function of my site. I think these entries provide some valuable guidance in how to make sure that you are successfully addressing educational standards and meeting students needs in ways consistent with ...

Recently, I received a question about the appropriateness of the Daily Five to the Common Core. Interesting question…. I think the purpose of the Daily Five is to provide teachers with a curriculum framework that guides them to spend time on a certain set of activities. Many teachers embrace it because it gives them a way to make sure a variety of things take place in their classrooms each day. Teaching is a complex job and frameworks that help simplify choices can be very useful. Although the Daily Five plan bears a superficial resemblance to what I used in the Chicago Public Schools, it differs from my approach in at least one big ...