Read and Coach

 November is all about the turkey, but bland white meat can be pretty dull. It's in the lesser-known November celebrations that we can find spicier classroom inspiration this month. For instance, aspiring novelists thrive in November as they push themselves toward writing the next classic during National Novel Writing Month ( NaNoWriMo) . The website even describes November as a "fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing." What if we took a NaNoWriMo approach to our classrooms, turned control over to the students, and let them frantically write, create, build, and engage just to see what they develop? Gamers and puzzlers also have some time to shine in the third week of November during game and puzzle week. What if there were a content area puzzle each week for our students to solve using readings, images, and resources? What if we looked at each lesson and found one way to remove teacher-provided knowledge and substitute in time for students to puzzle out answ...

 I have Wordled only once. In that one glorious try, I guessed the word in three attempts and proceeded to stop while I was ahead. By consulting some pretty sketchy data analyzing Twitter posts about Wordle, I discovered that my word knowledge is similar to 28% of people. Not a bad beginning and ending to my Wordle journey. According to the New York Times, over 300,000 people play the Wordle every day. What if we channeled that genius and our classrooms became places of wordy wonder as well? What if students spent five minutes every day guessing important words in our content area units as a warm-up? What if word work was gamified, active, and something students looked forward to doing? Research suggests that not enough of our instructional time is spent on vocabulary. In fact, in 2003, only 19 of 4,469 minutes were spent with a focus on vocabulary. When student achievement could increase by 33% with direct instruction of important words in the context of a unit, we have to ask ou...