English Teachers Chat

This is part two of my four part series Becoming a FITT Reader. Be sure to read Volume 1: Frequency here .  Reading is a skill. It's developed over time like our palate. It's like learning to distinguish deep umami flavors or appreciating a fine red wine. Too difficult texts creates non-readers in the same way a person new to sushi might totally scoff at a dragon roll over the more palatable California roll.  I, like I'm sure many other people, experienced an English class where the text was too difficult, too long, and too beyond my comprehension. In short: too intense. As a freshman in high school, I faked my way through readings of Great Expectations , and I also remember exclusively reading SparkNotes the time Dr. Cotter assigned the entirety of Dante's Inferno  for the next class a mere two days away in undergrad.  Ultimately, intensity in reading comes in four forms: text complexity, length, concept and content. What It (Sometimes) Looks Like There ar...

HyperDocs are here, and the potential for student exploration and engagement seems bountiful. But hold up— Before we delve into the potential, what is a HyperDoc? The short answer is: It's a Google Doc with a variety of links that leads to a number of different tasks. Once students receive this doc, they're free to explore it in any order and any pace of their choosing. But to sum up a HyperDoc as a Google Doc with just a bunch of links would be the equivalent of saying Moby Dick  is a book about a whale. To be so reductive is to miss the point. To see a full HyperDoc Click Here Going Beyond the Workshop Model As an ELA teacher, I'm a workshop model kind of guy. Walk into my class at any given moment, and you know what you will see. The first ten minutes? Reading. The next five to ten minutes? Quick Write. Followed by mini-lessons, workshop time and sharing somewhere in-between. It's routine (and never boring). Often times, I map out my work weeks in advan...