Happy New Year!!

Hello, and welcome to 2017....A new year always makes me feel like it's a fresh start.

I hope everybody is coming back from the break feeling rejuvenated, and ready to write this years new chapter in the book of life:)

As we get back into our business of focusing on increasing student thinking, and talking in order for students to develop a deeper understanding... folks are always asking for additional protocols for group work to ensure ALL students have a voice in some capacity every day.

There are so many wonderful strategies, and I would like to share an additional one with you. I hope you try it on in your class and report in the comments about the experience.


This strategy would work well with an article that you wanted all students to engage with meaningfully.

***By the Way***

Here is a link to free, printable bookmarks for students!! These are awesome, and great for reminding students that "Reading is Thinking". Grab some thick, cool paper, and get these in the hands of students!!

"Save the Last Word for Me"

1. Organize students into partner, triads, or groups of 4.


2. Each student silently highlights a passage that addresses what he/she considers to be the most significant idea or something that sparked their thinking.


3. The students number off. Student One reads his or her passage out loud to the group, and then he/she remains silent.


4. The other 3 participants each have 1 minute to respond to the passage, saying what it makes them think about, what questions it raises for them, etc. Have one student or all students be notetakers during this process in their notebook.


5. Student One then has 3 minutes to state why he or she chose that part of the article and to respond or build on what he or she heard from his or her peers.


6. Then the pattern is continued with each member of the group. Each student will have a chance to be the presenter and to have “the last word.”


7. As an option at the end of the activity, the whole class can have an open dialogue about the text and the ideas or questions raised during the protocol, or students can summarize the experience and how their thinking has changed because of it.

Here are some sentence starters that you can try on for different situations to support all students with access to appropriate academic-talk language:

The link is here for a pdf of these starters that you will find below. These are great to turn into table-tents for students to access on their desks for talk, print out for their toolbox in their notebooks, 

Lastly, I have a HUGE passion for notebooks...if you ever work with me you know this! Many folks are really excited to use notebooks as a tool for making thinking visible. Due to a variety of reasons many teachers have expressed interest in using a digital format of the notebook. The important piece with the digital variety is keeping the notebook organized. Recently, working with a small group of teachers and IST we found an awesome resource that we are all planning to explore to try on to get smarter with digital notebooks. Take a look at this resource, tutorial, and template ....and give it try!

Please leave your experiences, advice, and challenges in the comments section below. The more we use our collective intelligence, the more we can grow our own practice to impact student learning.

Take care!

Sara