Scriveners' Trappings

Your iPhone is packed with neat features that are not turned on by default. An example of this is the iPhone’s built-in dictionary.

You have a selection of dictionaries embedded inside your iPhone that allow you to look words up with just a few taps. You can also use this feature without an internet connection. With this useful feature you won’t need your third-party dictionary and translation apps any longer. Here’s how to use it

"Building an effective argument requires nuanced thinking, logical reasoning, compelling evidence, and strong audience awareness. Because of these complexities, students sometimes struggle with persuasive writing. You can ease their difficulties by introducing scaffolds and minilessons to support their writing process.

"Start by helping them choose a topic and develop a thesis.

How can I help students choose the right topic?

 

"A good persuasive writing topic is debatable and holds students’ interests. If your students don’t feel strongly about their topics, they will struggle to write well about them. For this reason, you should avoid assigning a singular topic for your entire class. Instead, offer choice."

Research has shown students to improve as readers and writers when both skills are taught in tandem. 

One way to connect reading and writing in your classroom is through an instructional strategy called Read STOP Write. (STOP stands for Summarize, Text structure, Organize, Plan.) This method helps students identify common text structures when reading and apply the structures to their writing.

Educator John Z. Strong introduced the strategy and its promising results in a recent issue of Literacy Today.

Read STOP Write asks students to complete six steps:

Read: Identify the main point and supporting details of a text.
Summarize: Write a single sentence that captures the main idea and key details.
Text structure: Identify how the author organizes the main idea and details.
Organize: Use a graphic organizer to arrange the details.
Plan: Use the same graphic organizer to gather original details about the same topic.
Write: Develop a paragraph using the same text structure to explore the same topic.
You likely have experience teaching students how to identify a main idea and supporting details (steps 1 and 2), but you may be less familiar with how to teach text structures (steps 3–6).

The late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-SENT-me high") was a long-time friend and contributor to Edge whose work changed our understanding of creativity, creation, and how meaningful work transforms the way that work is experienced. He was a deep thinker whose creativity in his own research could have been a template for the sort of creativity that he explained through experimentation. 

In August 2004, Mike, as he was known to those not familiar with Hungarian, stopped by our offices on 59th Street for a wide-ranging conversation that covered everything from his study of that state when play and work overlap (famously called "flow"), to creativity, to building a better future and understanding the role income disparity plays in destabilizing nations.

It was a wonderful talk full of the sort of insight that we had come to expect from him. But something happened in the dog days of summer—and his Edge conversation was never published. Only after news of Mike's passing in October did we happen to come across the unpublished feature in our archive.   

So we are pleased to present a two-part tribute to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

First, the premiere of "Flow: Positive Human Behavior," published eighteen years late. 

Second, a retrospective look at his numerous responses to the Edge Annual Question from 1998 to 2014. "

 

Jim Lerman's insight:  A wonderful and loving collection of ideas expressed by Csikszentmihalyi. No better way to spend some time than reading this.

Via Jim Lerman

Here is a collection of our favorite “bell ringers,” “do nows” and “hooks” to grab students’ attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons.

 

"How can you get your students interested in reading informational texts, whether the topic is Syria or sneakers, space exploration or statistics, surfing, superheroes or “the souls of Black girls”? How can you help them make connections between unfamiliar topics and their own lives? How can you scaffold complex ideas to make them accessible for a wide variety of learners?

 

"We’ve had lots of practice answering these questions. Our editorial staff — all of us former teachers — comes up with a fresh before-reading activity, or “warm-up,” for every Lesson of the Day we publish. We now have over 700 of them, all based on Times articles chosen from across sections of the paper, and all free to students around the world.

 

"Here we’ve combed through the collection, organized the strategies that we use most frequently and provided examples so that you can see how they work. Each is intended to be a brief activity — an appetizer before the main course. You can find them all listed here in this downloadable poster (PDF)"