Archive
Tag: Mark Pennington
23 Myths of Differentiated Instruction
Differentiated instruction "is simply a teacher attending to the learning needs of a particular student or small groups of students, rather than teaching a class as…
Teaching Essay Style: 15 Tricks of the Trade
“Never start a sentence with But.” Countless middle school and high school English-language arts teachers cringe when their students faithfully repeat this elementary school dictum. “Never…
Grammar Instruction: Establishing Common Ground
Perhaps no instructional issue in English-language arts produces more contentious debate than the issue of how best to teach grammar. All too often we bog down…
How to Teach Grammar
Within the field of English-language arts, there is probably no more contentious curricular issue than that of how to teach grammar. The “Reading Wars” and “Writing…
Don’t Rely on Rigor and Relevance
As a precursor to the current economic crisis, the in vogue educational leadership trend was the Rigor and Relevance Movement. Popularized over the last decade by…
How to Teach Prepositional Phrases
Wouldn't it make sense to spend instructional time on the part of speech that constitutes 30% of all writing? Prepositional phrases are used that much. The…
Teach Content Reading
A growing trend with Response to Intervention models is to expand the reading block to more than two hours per day. Elementary reading is reductive. More…
Response to Intervention: What Doesn’t Work
With the newly released RtI document and as states and districts scramble to conform to Race to the Top carrots and sticks, voices of experience need…