Quotes About Students

district schools are shown to outperform charters on important national measures, including SAT scores—even as they accept all students, including those with learning disabilities.

To keep the place running smoothly, students' behavior becomes more important than their understanding, acquiescence more valued than inquiry

foster a teacher's habit of paying close attention to what students say, whether they speak through words or actions.

I know that the way he comes into a classroom, he wants the students to leave knowing math. This makes me open my mind to what he has to say and how he's trying to say it.

but what about students with exceptional intelligence who could compensate?

Fred's Jewish students recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. "He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel," they read.

I suffered the usual post–collective experience letdown. Sure, I was relieved. Field school was concluded without any disasters of note, and now I could focus on Emma's skeleton. But the students' departure also left me feeling dismally empty. The kids could be exasperating, no question. The unending hubbub. The clowning. The inattention. But my students were also energizing, bursting with enthusiasm, and lousy with youth.

The most repressed, and damaged, and 'unteachable' students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they've become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed. I could show you many many examples where education has clearly been a destructive process.

Shouldn't schools be the place where students interact with interesting books? Shouldn't the faculty have an ongoing laser-like commitment to put good books in our students' hands? Shouldn't this be a front-burner issue at all times?

I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.

Valuing reading" is often a euphemism for preparing students to pass mandated multiple-choice exams, and in dragging students down this path, schools are largely contributing to the development of readicide.

Instead, I designed the unit with one question in mind: What is in the best interest of my students?

Clearly, if we want students to perform well on standardized reading tests, our top priority should not be on narrowing students into a test-prep curriculum; our focus should be on providing our students with the widest reading experiences possible.

It is modeling revision—taking a rough draft and moving it to a better place—that is critical if our students are to sharpen their writing skills.

Instead, to develop agency, our students would be better served if we created what Judy Wallis, a veteran teacher in Houston, refers to as a "three-text" classroom: a place where students encounter texts we all read, where students encounter texts that some of us read, and where students encounter texts that they read independently. Our students need a blended reading experience, and in Chapter 8 I discuss a model for developing this kind of a classroom. I

National Writing Project sites: "Students need to read like writers and they need to write like readers.

I am not against teaching students how to take a test. Indeed, we want all of our students to have test-taking knowledge. However, the emphasis of teaching reading through the lens of preparing students for state-mandated tests has become so completely unbalanced that it is drowning any chance our adolescents have of developing into lifelong readers.

How do we get students to understand that the hard work and frustration that comes with learning how to write well is worth it? How do we get students to see the importance writing can play in their adult lives? How do we change the fact that seven out of ten students are leaving high school without adequate writing skills?

What does it matter if teachers sprint through all the standards if at the end of the year their students still cannot write well?

ELA teachers to cut back on the reading of literature and poetry. This trend of moving students away from literary reading is antithetical to good ELA instruction. Kids need more literary reading, not less.

If I want my students to work toward becoming real-world writers, I need to shift the focus of my writing instruction toward real-world writing purposes.

When students are taught to approach argument through inquiry, good things happen: they choose topics worthy of arguing, they gain ownership (through choice) of their writing, and their teacher is not stuck in Groundhog Day reading the same argument paper over and over. Key

As much as possible, I am trying to create agency in my young writers. Students who have acquired agency don't need the teacher to assign them a prompt; they are young writers who are able to independently generate writing from self-initiated ideas. They revel in choice—the very choice I am afraid will disappear in classrooms operating under the testing pressures generated by the Common Core writing standards. One

Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers.