The Word on Numbers

One of my favorite people at my school is Sara Kelly. She is an advanced ELL ELA teacher with 20 years in education. She has a B.M.E. in music education from the University of Kansas and a TESOL certification from Arkansas Tech University. She is a constant source of great ideas and loves data more than any non-math teacher has a right to! I invited her to share her thoughts about literacy in non-ELA classes. I hope you appreciate her perspective on the importance of all teachers teaching reading.       How many times have teachers sitting in professional development been told that everyone is a reading teacher? I can vividly remember this phrase being uttered in the early years of my career, one where I was a young choir teacher who thought to herself, I have enough to worry about in my class, now I’m expected to teach reading? However, as I have matured, reflected on my classroom teaching, and, more recently, switched careers to an ELL English teacher, I realize th...

I was introduced to this close reading strategy for math problems in an AVID math class focusing on discourse.  It is important that the teacher choose a problem carefully and be prepared to discuss difficulties that the students may bump up against. As a counter-example to this, I chose a problem for my ELL inclusion class last year in which students were asked to find the volume of a silo. I did not take into account that students would need to be exposed to what a silo was. It was perfectly fine to spend time discussing what silos were and what shape they resembled. However, I was not prepared to review this quickly which caused a loss of flow in the 3-Read protocol. Make sure you have thought of what problems might arise from the word problems you choose.  The protocol has 3 close reads. There is a bit of teacher work on the front end to remove and reintroduce the word problem.   1. First Read: the problem is read for CONTEXT. Numbers are removed; questions are r...