Live at CATE: Are you an Upstander, a Bystander or a Victim?
Biggest takeaway at CATE: pretty much everyone seems in agreement that the Common Core standards, though not perfect, are full of exciting possibilities (as opposed to the Common Core tests, which are almost inevitably paired with the phrase “train wreck.”)
All the technique-based sessions I’ve attended have focused on close reading and inquiry to address Common Core ideas of analytic reading and writing. Most of the techniques are variations on the Say/Mean/Matter strategies that Catherine Stine uses at Animo Leadership and many strategies use multiple short texts, including art, film and photograph, to approach a single question. Over the next couple of weeks, rather than post about every single one, having learned all these techniques, I’ll be adding a Great Strategies bar to this blog, focused on specific hands-on tactics for attacking texts.
For me, though, the most exciting thing I’ve learned wasn’t a technique so much as a lens through which to view text; it came in a session called “Close Reading is Re-Reading: Helping Students Read the Text a Second, Third or Fourth Time,” led by Tim Dewar, who directs the Secondary Credential program as well as the South Coast Writing Project at UCSB. Dewar offered an array of strategies presented by students in his Methods class, all of them quite useful, but what stayed with me was an essential question asked by two
Live at CATE! | Gatsby In L.A.
Live at CATE! | Gatsby In L.A.: Live at CATE! Things are heating up here—literally! It’s Valentine’s Day but who needs romance when you can cram into a tiny side room at a seminar with 40 or so English teachers at the California Association of Teachers of English convention in San Diego?On the plus side, love may not be in the air (at least not for the four frazzled, middle-aged English teachers