In the Best Interest of Students Quotes

“Instead, I designed the unit with one question in mind: What is in the best interest of my students?”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“In other words, in an age of great shifts in education, very little has shifted when it comes to the teaching of adolescent readers. The teaching of reading remains stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t work, and when students are stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t work, there are dire consequences: •”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“Instead, to develop agency, our students would be better served if we created what Judy Wallis, a veteran teacher in Houston, refers to as a “three-text” classroom: a place where students encounter texts we all read, where students encounter texts that some of us read, and where students encounter texts that they read independently. Our students need a blended reading experience, and in Chapter 8 I discuss a model for developing this kind of a classroom. I”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“Grading doesn’t make my students better writers. Lots of practice coupled with meaningful feedback makes my students better writers.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“As much as possible, I am trying to create agency in my young writers. Students who have acquired agency don’t need the teacher to assign them a prompt; they are young writers who are able to independently generate writing from self-initiated ideas. They revel in choice—the very choice I am afraid will disappear in classrooms operating under the testing pressures generated by the Common Core writing standards. One”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“In the real world, writing is not artificially separated into specific discourses. It is blended for effect.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“When students are taught to approach argument through inquiry, good things happen: they choose topics worthy of arguing, they gain ownership (through choice) of their writing, and their teacher is not stuck in Groundhog Day reading the same argument paper over and over. Key”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“The key point here bears repeating: I have decided on an argument (“Technology has weakened parenting skills”), but I didn’t start with that argument in mind. Instead, I started by reading lots of data under the umbrella of the unit of study, and it was through the reading of this data that my research question emerged.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“That is to say, the process of working through an argument is the process of inquiry” (2011, xxii; emphasis in original). The approach Hillocks suggests is the opposite of the traditional approach to teaching the argument paper, where a student starts with a claim and then begins to find evidence that supports the claim. Instead, Hillocks says that students should start with inquiry. They should “swim” in issues until interesting arguments begin to emerge.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“When we think about how to move our students into deeper levels of reading, it is helpful to remember an expression that has been used for years at National Writing Project sites: “Students need to read like writers and they need to write like readers.” The first half of that statement—“Students need to read like writers”—is especially true when it comes to getting students to recognize what a text does. To”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“the reading of fiction facilitated the development of social skills because it provides the reader with the experience of thinking about other people.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“National Writing Project sites: “Students need to read like writers and they need to write like readers.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“ELA teachers to cut back on the reading of literature and poetry. This trend of moving students away from literary reading is antithetical to good ELA instruction. Kids need more literary reading, not less.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“What does it matter if teachers sprint through all the standards if at the end of the year their students still cannot write well?”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom

“hitching your wagon blindly to any standards movement is rarely a good idea.”
― Kelly Gallagher, In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom