Six Components of Teaching Reading

Component 1: Reading Aloud Reading aloud can be done as a full class activity, in small groups, or on a one-to-one basis. It involves an adult reading a piece of text or a book out loud to students. However it is done, it is a teacher-directed activity that requires student participation, as Debra Morrison indicates in Read Aloud and Movement, an ASCD video-based professional development program. Debra reads a book to her students about a cricket who wants to be a butterfly. As she reads, sh...

 How to Improve Self-Control in Schools

Make school more demanding for all students In its coverage of U.S. secondary education, the popular press tends to focus on two relatively small groups: students headed for elite colleges (many of whom are under tremendous stress and pressure) and students at risk for dropping out (many of whom come from the most disadvantaged communities). These stories are important to tell, but they leave out the vast majority of students, who don't fall into either of these extremes. These high school st...

 Measuring Cultural Information

But there may be more significant ways to characterize civilizations than by the energy they use for communications purposes. An important criterion of a civilization is the total amount of information that it stores. This information can be described in terms of bits, the number of yes-no statements concerning itself and the universe that such a civilization knows. An example of this concept is the popular game of "Twenty Questions," as played on Earth. One player imagines an object or conc...