teaching

Writing ► March 8, 2020

6 Ways You Should Be Scaffolding Student Writing

You’ve probably heard a million times that you should be using differentiated instruction in your classroom. If you’re in a stricter building, it may even be required that you document your differentiation strategies. But how, exactly, are we supposed to differentiate writing instruction for our advanced, gifted, special education, trauma-sensitive, and ELL learners in a single class period!? It seems impossible! At least it does until you consider scaffolding writing instruction.

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Writing ► December 15, 2019

CER Writing: A Complete Guide to Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning

Have you been told that you need to start using a claim, evidence, and reasoning (or C-E-R) framework for writing in your classroom? Maybe you need to closely adhere to the Common Core State Standards but aren’t quite sure where to begin. If you’re like me, you may have been told by administration-on-high that the whole school would be using C-E-R language in their classes to build consistency and teacher equity for students. Regardless, here you are wondering, what the heck is claim, evidence, and reasoning anyway? In this post, I aim to break it down for you.

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Literature ► April 7, 2019

Why I Love Teaching Young Adult Literature

I started my journey to add young adult literature to my classroom when I finally ran out of patience for our outdated African American unit. The updates went so well, I’ve begun branching out into my other classes and units. I have found that young adult literature is especially great for engaging my at-risk students. Better yet though, it’s engaging for me. When I’m teaching more contemporary novels, I’m more thoughtful and engaged in my teaching.

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