My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Tony, was hell-bent on teaching me to diagram sentences and memorize parts of speech. I was an epic failure at both. Fast forward a zillion years… Read more
My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Tony, was hell-bent on teaching me to diagram sentences and memorize parts of speech. I was an epic failure at both. Fast forward a zillion years… Read more
“Nothing.” “It’s boring.” “I guess.” “This sucks.” “I don’t know.”Every educator gets these responses from students now and again. In 25+ years of teaching students who struggle with language, with school, or with themselves… Read more
If you teach language and literacy for a living, I bet you had at least one moment recently where you thought you’d be put out of work by a bot.I did, too. But only one. (Okay, maybe two.)For sure, bots are here to stay. Educators are using AI to… Read more
A former colleague sent me an article the other day asking for my thoughts. The article, something along the lines of Reasons Kids Can’t Write and What to Do About It, was similar to others I’ve come across.The text started with… Read more
The first rule of Brain Frames is you don’t teach Brain Frames. You teach… Read more
As much as we long to get back to our “life before Covid” — seeing each other and working with SLPs, teachers, and schools in person — we can’t…. Read more
“A high school senior without a driver’s license is like a…”I struggled to complete that sentence as my student gave me a rueful smile and nodded his head… Read more
Some sentences are harder than others to understand, especially for students with developmental language disorders (DLD). Comprehension suffers when meaning doesn’t follow the order of the words or sentences are dense with details. For example:… Read more
I was chatting recently with a fifth-grade teacher I’ve gotten to know through several of our trainings and workshops. I mused that the switch to online teaching last year must have wreaked havoc on her planning. “Not really,” she said. “I used… Read more
Classrooms are orderly because chaos does awful things to students. Everything is coming at them at once, and they can’t sort it or make sense of it. They don’t know what to do next. Bombarded by what feels random and confusing, they become… Read more