Join passionate educators who transform their classrooms w/research from the fields of science, psychology and athletics.
We can do the same in the English classroom.
The brain possesses several basic impulses that should direct our instruction choices.
The timeliness of feedback increases the likelihood that the skill becomes part of a permanent long-term memory.
Create instruction so all students can understand and practice the reading and writing movements of the most skilled minds.
Our workshops guide teachers through the actual activities designed for students. Teachers will experience the same level of movement and concrete feedback about the reading and writing “Plays” that we provide for our own students. Our strategies are anchored in brain research and used with actual students.
We consult with individual schools and design workshops for their humanities teachers. We use your content to shape the professional development so it’s specific to your needs. We also provide
individual coaching for teachers.
Teachers who attend our workshops and buy our books have access to additional student samples
and on-going variations of our activities.
Through Dr. Degen’s workshop I learned an approach for helping my students develop their analytical voice, a task which can often feel mysterious and frustrating to students. Dr. Degen provided detailed feedback and encouragement that helped me grasp and apply material. I now have powerful tools to help my students enter the world of interpretation, and am excited to bring what I learned back to my classroom!
Dr. Degen–this has been a tremendous three days. Your brain research information, coupled with your techniques of teaching has been encouraging and clarifying. Enlightening. I feel like I actually have many things to bring back to school and implement immediately. I am grateful, to say the least.
I think the way you “trick” the kids into recognizing themes and the big ideas in literature and poetry is great. I am going to try giving the kiddos smaller chunks of writing, so that they can make the associations on smaller sentences, phrases, and such. I think especially for my 8th graders when they approach difficult text, it is easy for them to give up and say they don’t get it. The smaller bites will allow all of them to feel some success and allow them to build on it. I can see where this will be helpful for all of them, but most especially for those students who are struggling with literature.
I finally, finally understand how to teach a student to develop a line of reasoning. The chart, although creating one is not my go-to move, will help kids develop their own lines of reasoning.
Thanks for what you do and thanks for sharing with me!
Excellent workshop, so much to integrate into my classroom. Thank you Dr. Degen!
Thank you so much for the session, and for you patience while I was participating on the road! I solidified a lot of elements I only got a partial hold of two summers ago, and I feel confident about implementing much of this in my 7th grade English classroom. Thanks, Dr. Degen!
You really have a wealth of knowledge and I appreciate all that you shared with us!
Great conference with fantastic and useful information. Thank you.
Once you teach students what the “L2 Play” means, they can quickly discern between plot and an interpretive idea. When giving feedback to students who are merely re-telling the details of the story, you’ll just say, “I haven’t heard any L2–increase the quantity.”
The effectiveness of the “Plays” is their simplicity and clarity. They turn what seems for some a mysterious power of interpretation into an intellectual movement that is concrete and observable.
Yes– the interpretive strategies work with all texts – no need to change a system when approaching a poem or a cartoon or a nonfiction text.
Our primary graphic organizer the Evidence-Association Chart visualizes for students the basic movements of reading and provides the data for piecing together sentences, paragraphs, and whole essays. The Paragraph Chart focuses more precisely on four concrete plays that develop unity and coherence inside the paragraph. Our math/science students particular enjoy the structured data collection and alignment the organizers provide.
Clarity. Model. Repetition. Feedback
