Natalie Wexler Quotes

In short, teaching writing is not only inseparable from teaching content, it can also be tantamount to teaching students how to think critically.

When I die,” goes one internet meme, “I want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.

Students who aren’t reading on grade level by third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school. If the child is poor, the odds are even worse.

It’s true that we all construct our own knowledge, in the sense that we don’t just store facts we’ve heard verbatim. We need to interpret and synthesize to achieve true understanding.

For is not a Book the most reliable of Companions--and generally among the most stimulating as well? No need to worry about amusing or pleasing or making a good impression on a Book, when its only purpose is to entertain and, perhaps, instruct. And if it should fail in that purpose, one can merely return it to its shelf, without so much as a by-your-leave and no occasion for anxiety about its wounded Pride, either.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see an American school that consistently combines a focus on content with an instructional method that fully exploits the potential of writing to build knowledge and critical thinking abilities for every child.

Research has established that one aspect of reading does need to be taught and practiced as a set of skills, much like math: decoding, the part that involves matching sounds to letters. The problem is that the other aspect of reading—comprehension—is also being taught that way. While there’s plenty of evidence that some instruction in some comprehension strategies can be helpful for some children, there’s no reason to believe it can turn struggling readers into accomplished ones.

guide poor readers to use the same techniques to monitor and control their thinking, a process called metacognition.

to have to show them how to “read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.

the 57 most important words in education reform.

Calkins is right that teachers need to have high expectations. But even astronomical expectations won’t do any good unless children get the explicit instruction they need to meet them.

two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today” are personal opinion and personal narrative. “The only problem with those two forms of writing,” he continues, “is that as you grow up in this world, you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.

Hochman Method was beginning to spread beyond the special-education world.

In a fifth-grade unit on Westward Expansion, for example, teachers aren’t supposed to tell kids, “The question we’re going to write about today is how the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 led to settlers moving west.” Instead, they’re advised to say, “Historians write about relationships between events because the past will always have an impact on what unfolds in the future.” Students are encouraged to consider generalities like “what historians might care about that is special to history.” It’s difficult enough for many kids to understand Westward Expansion without also having to think about what historians “might care about”—a directive that is so broad as to be almost meaningless.