Teach summarising better, monitor progress more effectively and two remarkable high-school students make history
Become a better teacher with Substack #5
✨ I learn a lot from my colleagues and I’m sharing that here on Substack through my newsletter, How to be a Teacher.
🤌But Substack - wonderful place that it is - is also something my practice takes inspiration from.
🫶Therefore, I’d like to share what I’ve been reading because there’s a lot more for you to gain from it too.
📖Here are my favourite reads this week:
Is Lucy Calkins Really a Proponent of "Direct, Explicit Instruction"?
by Natalie Wexler (Minding the Gap)
Teaching writing is about as complex as teaching any acadmic subject. Teaching children to summarise writing is about as tricky as writing skills get. Fortunately, the brilliant Natalie Wexler has laid out the simplest, most accessible method for summarising I have ever seen - and I’ve been racking my brain for one for some time. I’m not going to post it here because I implore you to click the heading above and read her post - it is laced with great advice and expert insights and will go quite some way to making you better at teaching writing.
Direct Instruction: Building a Stronger Teaching Presence
by Erin Siverd (Quick Bites)
Erin’s Substack newsletter is spectacularly useful; you’ll blitz through her posts in a heartbeat and come away with a new, instantly-applicable teaching strategy/method/idea every time because they’re so concise and so clever.
This post delves into one of Professor Barak Rosenshine’s teaching principles. For those who don’t know Rosenshine yet WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN LIVING? He’s the absolute oracle of teacher instruction and perfecting your delivery. Erin builds on one of his key principles with a great method for analysing children’s work and measuring their assessment of their own understanding - exit tickets. I love the way she applies it and plan on including this in my teaching very, very soon.
Subscribe to her here for more - there’s a lot on offer.
High school students who came up with 'impossible' proof of Pythagorean theorem discover 9 more solutions to the problem
by Dr. Lois Jeremy-Greene (The Joy of Teaching) - original reporting of the story by Sascha Pare
This is the most inspirational story I’ve read in a long, long time.
Two high-school students cracked a once-thought impossible solution to a maths problem - use trigonometry to provide proof of the Pythagorus theorem. They have since found nine - 9 - yes, NINE - new solutions to the problem. Something no one has been able to do with a 2,000-year-old theorem. I’m just blown away by the whole story - and there’s much more positive news in education on offer if you subscribe to her newsletter here.
Fine work, ladies. Fine work.
❤️ Remember, sharing is caring! If you know anyone else who might benefit from these talented writers, click share below to send this article their way. I’ve written a few of these now so there are more on my page.
🤓I love reading widely and learning more so don’t be afraid to make recommendations in the comments below on what I should take a look at too!
👋See you tomorrow for my weekly post on How to be a Teacher - subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it.
