Month: May 2016

A Conversation with Mike Schmoker

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by Dave Stuart Jr.

Four years ago, at the very outset of this blog, I was starting to blog through the Common Core State Standards. Providentially, at about the same time I had decided to re-read Mike Schmoker’s Focus.

That re-read bit was new for me. I was at a point in my career where I sensed it was high time I stop reading new PD books. I think we all can reach that point, where reading more professional stuff can actually be quite bad for us. So instead of reading something new, I decided to re-read the one book that I thought had the greatest chance of training me to think more clearly. Focus was the book I chose.

About six months after starting the blogging quest and embarking on the re-reading of Focus, I wrote the first version of the Non-Freaked Out Framework. You can click here to see what it was at first, and you’ll see in Figure 1 what it looks like presently. [1] Schmoker’s “less is more” mindset was seminal, and I said as much in a post that preceded NFO 1.0, titled “How to Not Freak Out About the Common Core.” If you’re someone who has appreciate that framework in any of its iterations, you are in for a treat today.

I won’t include any spoilers for today’s interview. Let’s just dive into it.

Listen to the interview here.

LINK: Dave Stuart’s blog

5 Ways Librarians Can Meet The Needs of Students in Poverty

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By Jennifer LaGarde

This afternoon the librarians in my school district had the great privilege of (virtually) spending an hour with Donalyn Miller, talking about all the ways that we can be independent reading champions for our students. The conversation was rich and important and I am so grateful to her for sharing this time with us.

In fact, this research goes onto to point out that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.”

That said, one of the (many) pieces of information Donalyn shared during our time together was the recent research suggesting that children raised in homes with (access to) more than 500 books (over the course of their lifetime) spend an average of three years longer in school than children whose homes contain little or no print material. In fact, this research goes onto to point out that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.”

That’s kind of amazing. But it also got me thinking…

LINK: con’t @ The Adventures of Library Girl