The Social/Emotional Side of Literacy
Newsletter
This week we explore the social and emotional side of literacy instruction.
In this post, I examine my own ups and downs of a reading life and offer some thoughts on how to generalize our authentic experiences to the classroom.
The previous post was partly prompted by a controversial article in the New York Times, “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?”.
I discovered the article through a Daniel Willingham tweet, a professor who seems to endorse the original piece with a blog post of his own.
Be sure to check out P.L. Thomas’s short rebuttal of the many media outlets which seem to misrepresent reading instruction as merely a science.
Rita Platt’s post from this past summer about making independent reading a priority helps to keep our purpose for reading instruction in perspective.
In a guest post, Kathy Wade connects social and emotional learning with literacy by offering lessons around Kevin Henke’s Chrysanthemum.
Kathy provides a link within her post to the ASCD Whole Child framework website. It’s a helpful approach for thinking about how social and emotional learning can be enveloped within the academic environment.
One way to build student self-confidence and agency is by guiding them to become assessment-capable learners. I shared this Principal article on the topic with my faculty this week.
Gratitude and grace are important tenets of social and emotional learning. Pernille Ripp and Margaret Simon provided personal examples of both in recent blog posts.
I journal almost daily. Day One is my go-to app for reflective writing about my professional and personal life.
Bonus: Download this two page template for guiding students to develop their own digital portfolios and take charge of their learning. It is adapted from my book Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student Work.
