Subjects Matter Chapter 9 & 10 (The "Well, duh!" Chapters)

I’m not sure about you but when I think about putting practice to good use in my classroom I think about supplementing my students with real-life representations of my subject area (ELA) as a part of their materials. By doing this it would help our students better understand and utilize our lessons in their daily and academic lives, right?

Subjects Matter Chapter 8 (and aforementioned of Chapter 5)

In the ELA curriculum it is very important that we give our students time and space to independently explore their texts. Through this activity the students must work through their reading—often time they are also encouraged to research outside their text—and come to a deeper than usual understanding of their materials before working it into in-class discusses. All the same, the student and teacher must be able to read through the lines and develop their own skills in which to utilize and retain information from their texts and other materials. The teacher, as the oldest student in the room, is responsible for teaching and passing on the knowledge in grasping important and relevant key concepts to their younger students and learners. (Often we refer to this as “Learning how to take notes.”) From that, our students are then responsible for honing in on their preferred methods and must fine tune their knowledge base, reading skills, and note taking skills on their own. Gradually. Independently.

Subjects Matter Chapter 6 and 7

When textbooks do not provide enough we as the educator are not allowed to simply write them off and utilize that as the excuse to our inadequate lessons or materials. As the most advanced student in the classroom, it is our duty to educate the younger students in the methods, techniques, and concepts of our discipline. After all, it is that liberty which catapults us into the performance and role of the educator.

Context + RAFT = STYLE

CRAFT, otherwise defined as Context, Role, Audience, text Format, and Topic.

These are the Ten Design Principles

1. Create topics that invite inventive thinking
2. Select topics that have a purpose
3. Make sure your topics are meaningful within your students' experience
4. Design topics to elicit specific, immediate responses from your students, not vague abstract ones
5. If you use a hypothetical situation, make sure it's within your students' grasp
6. Use specific terms (such as define, illustrate, persuade, compare, contrast, analyze, evaluate, or invent) as precises indicators of your thinking and writing expectations
7. Use creative formats for at least some of your assignments (Such as a letter to the mayor expressing concerns with the city's parks, or a report on nutrition written by a martian)
8. Think of CRAFT when designing your assignments
9. Whenever possible, give students a choice of writing assignments
10. Define the criteria you'll use to evaluate student writing