A couple of weeks ago I shared a picture of Jo Facer at Michaela school. She’d used a list of sophisticated verbs that added depth and nuance to discussion about what a text “showed” to expand her students vocabulary and precision when discussing texts. The idea resonated with lots of folks so I am happy to…
This week in our video review meetings we cut a master clip of Courtney Huber, a fourth grade teacher at North Star Academy’s Vailsburg Elementary School in Newark. We call it a master clip because it is a case study in the use of all the parts of Checking for Understanding woven together. It starts as…
It’s been a busy morning at TLaC Towers (pictured) where high, above the pulsing city of Glenmont, NY, (population 5,200), we’ve been cutting amazing video for our upcoming workshop on Engaging Academics, to be held April 10 and 11 in Albany. Needless to say at the workshop we’ll do some serious geeking out on all of…
When you finally get your hands on TLaC 2.0, technique #36 (or thereabouts) will be something you didn’t see in the first edition of the book: Show Call. The idea was developed by teachers at Uncommon who adapted Cold Call with a view to building incentive for students to do top quality work when writing or…
Over on the TLac Facebook page we posted an amazing video of North Star Academy’s Ashley Hinton using non-verbals to correct minor off-task behaviors while still teaching. The clip met with instant response. Meanwhile in a fascinating view behind the curtain of Uncommon‘s culture of constant improvement, I thought I’d share the following exchange between Joaquin…