Call and response
Over the past few years I've spent a lot of time visiting schools to talk about literacy. One of my stock nuggets of advice is that it's worth spending lesson time scaffolding students' speech in order to help them become fluent in academic language. My contention is talk is a powerful cognitive lever and that by getting students to speak in academic language it changes the way they think. If you can think in academic language then writing becomes straightforward. I call this my simple theory about writing. Amazingly though, I've very rarely seen this done well. Teachers are very keen on making [...]