the PaperWings

Imagine that in your second life, you decide to learn how to walk a tightrope. Your mentor coaches you by saying, "balance." If that was the extent of their teaching, I'd advise you to run for the hills! Balancing is a skill. But there are plenty of strategies that go into learning how to balance. Balance by holding your arms straight out. Balance by keeping your chin up. Balance by tightening your core.   Teaching reading and writing are the same. Every teaching point in a minilesson needs to have both a skill and a strategy. A skill is something that you teach children because they need it to become proficient readers, and a strategy is a way to achieve it. One skill might have many different strategies, but we only teach one at a time.   Even though we may call determining importance a strategy when we are talking to children, it's really a big umbrella skill. There are many different ways that a reader can determine importance. They can determine impor...

What follows is Lucy Calkin's TCRWP (Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project) version of the workshop minilesson-   and the version to which I subscribe. For this posting, I'll be talking in reading terms, but it is the same structure for writing. Every minilesson has four parts: connection, teach (within that is the teaching point), active engagement, and link.   In the connection, we refer back to something we've read or learned as a class or to a problem you've been noticing. Or, we can begin with a little story from our own reading lives. The point is to help children access the schema they will need to proceed. In the teach, we clearly state what it is that we will teach them through a one sentence teaching point. Even if you are doing a minilesson on the fly and have not planned the entire thing out, the one-sentence teaching point needs to be thought out in advance so that you can state it the same, non-cluttered, clear...

Ever finish teaching a small reading group and wonder, "what did I actually teach just now"? You are right to reflect on that question (often!) since teachers get such a limited time with students working in small, focused groups each day. If you believe, as I do, that teaching in small groups and one-on-one is the most effective part of your teaching day, then you'll want to get the absolute biggest bang for your buck possible. By focusing on one strategy during a small group lesson (I mean it! Just ONE strategy at a time- no cheating!), you can maximize student understanding and the probability that they will remember and use what you've taught them. This is the whole idea of the strategy group. Instead of supporting a group of like-leveled readers as they read an entire on-level book, strategy groups pull together a group of heterogeneous students in order to explicitly teach one strategy that they all need. When a child leaves your group, you and each child n...