Kelly Gallagher is one of those teachers who is one step ahead of what our children need in order to become better readers and writers. I enjoy what he calls the Article of the Week. He assigns his students an article for the week. This eventually creates a foundation of their prior knowledge, since many of his students come to class with very few references about the world. “It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text”. Gallagher is a teacher in California who has written many books, including "Readicide, a book about how schools are not preparing our children well to read and write. Like all of us, he is concerned that our profession, at the moment, is more focused on teaching for standardized tests and not teaching meaningful material. Here, I have included a couple of his conversations on this topic and other issues in education.
Part 1
