I am excited to share that I have a book coming out: The ABCs of Teaching English Learners: 26 Enduring, High-Impact, Low-Prep Frameworks and Practices.

It is an expansion of the work I have been doing here on Read, Write, Howl, broader in scope and deeper in detail than what fits in a single post. Twenty-six chapters. One letter at a time.

If this resonates with you, I am looking for a small number of readers who would be willing to offer a review upon release.

Send me a message, or comment ABCs below, and I will send you a link to the full manuscript.

I am grateful for this community. I am excited to finally put this in your hands.

The Minimalist Teacher

Tanya Musiowsky-Borneman and C. Y. Arnold

Your shelf is full. Your plans are full. Your week is full. And somehow, at the end of it, you still feel like you did not do enough. The Minimalist Teacher does not ask you to do more. It asks you to look hard at what you are already doing and decide what is actually worth keeping.

Who This Is For

The teacher who has been adding and adding: strategies, materials, programs, initiatives. You have footing. You have experience. And you are starting to feel the weight of everything you have accumulated.

This is not a book for someone who needs permission to be lazy. It is a book for someone who needs permission to be selective. There is a difference, and the authors are clear about it.

New teachers will find value here too, particularly in learning early what to reach for and what to leave on the shelf. But the teacher who feels this book most is the one already standing inside the overwhelm.

What It Offers

The book works through four areas where minimalism changes teaching: time, space, materials, and relationships. Time and materials hit hardest. How you structure your day and what you actually put in front of students are the two levers most teachers pull constantly without ever stopping to ask which ones are working.

The authors introduce the Triple P process: Pause, Prioritize, and Proceed. A simple framework for stepping back before adding something new, evaluating whether it serves your actual goals, and moving forward with intention rather than habit. It sounds obvious until you realize how rarely most teachers actually do it.

The book is short and explicit in its structure, which is fitting. It practices what it teaches.

What It Changes

The Triple P becomes something you adapt over time. For English learners especially, whose needs shift constantly, a fixed framework only gets you so far. The version that works is the one shaped around your students, your responsibilities, and what the moment actually calls for.

I return to it three times a year: the start, February, and the end. And almost always during assessment stretches, when both teachers and students are trying to keep pace with classwork and testing at the same time. That is when the question of what we actually need most becomes the only question worth asking. Stripping back during those moments is not giving up. It is focusing on what students and teachers will benefit from most when everything feels urgent.

The shift is not in how much you do. It is in how deliberately you do it. Teaching minimally does not mean teaching less. It means examining your own practice with enough honesty to see what is evergreen, what is too topical to carry its weight, and what can stretch across content and skills without losing its shape.

The Honest Limitation

Not every teacher has the same flexibility. Mandated materials, strict fidelity requirements, and top-down curriculum decisions are real. The minimalist approach works within those constraints, not around them. The goal is not to discard what you are given but to be more intentional about how you use it, where your energy goes, and what you let take up space in your room and your head.

Beyond the Book

The authors host The Minimalist Educator Podcast, now over 100 episodes deep. It is a natural extension of the book and a series worth returning to on its own terms. Guests cover planning without panic, human-centered schools, doing less rescuing to grow more resilient students, and what horror films teach educators about sharper thinking. The same philosophy, widened out into conversations you will want to keep coming back to.

The Minimalist Educator Podcast

Buy The Minimalist Teacher on Amazon

If You Liked This, Try These

• The Together Teacher by Maia Haggerty

• Teaching Unplugged by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury

THE STACK REVIEW SERIES

Your Turn

Pick one thing you do every week and ask yourself: is this earning its place? Not whether it is required. Whether it is working. And think about when in the year you tend to feel the weight of too much. The start, the middle, assessment season. Those are your reset moments. Name them. Come back and tell me what you found. If you have already read this one, reply and tell me what you kept and what you let go.

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Sometimes students are not disengaged or unwilling.

They are simply trying to leap to a destination without the steps to get there.

What It Actually Is

The Zone of Proximal Development, a concept developed by psychologist Lev Vygotsky, describes the space between what a student is currently able to do independently and what they are able to do with support. Learning happens in this zone. Below it, tasks are too easy to produce growth. Above it, tasks are too far out of reach to produce anything except frustration.

ZPD is not a fixed location. As students grow, the zone moves. What required full support last month requires partial support this month and no support next month. Tracking that movement is the work of teaching.

Central to ZPD is the role of the More Knowledgeable Other, or MKO. In ENL classrooms, the MKO takes several forms: the teacher providing explicit instruction and modeling, a more proficient language peer, or a peer with specific content knowledge the student needs to access the task. The MKO knows not only the destination but the student well enough to identify the strengths to build on and the gaps to account for. The better you know your students, the more effective you are as the MKO (see K — Know Your Students).

Why It Matters

ZPD gives you both a direction and a pace. Teaching below the zone wastes time and disengages students. Teaching above the zone overwhelms them and produces the same result: students who stop trying. Both are costly. Both are avoidable.

Misjudging the zone is common and correctable. Most teachers have pitched instruction too high and watched students shut down, or too low and watched them drift. The goal is not perfection. The goal is awareness. When you notice the zone is off, adjust. Lower the support before lowering the expectation. Raise the complexity before raising the frustration.

ZPD applies to both skills and content, separately and in combination. Do not simplify content in order to teach a language structure. Hold the content expectation and scaffold the language access. Students are thinking at grade level even when their English is not yet there. Treating them otherwise limits what they are able to show you.

Students also need safety to take risks at the edge of their zone. A high Affective Filter closes the zone off entirely, regardless of how well the instruction is designed (see A — Affective Filter). Lowering the filter is not separate from ZPD work. Lowering the filter is what makes ZPD work possible.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Consider one beginner ENL student working on oral language production. Asked what food they like, the student says one word: apples. The teacher identifies the zone and begins leading. First, with a sentence frame, the student produces a complete sentence: I like apples. Next, with a model and a prompt, the student moves to something more specific: My favorite food is an apple. Over time, with repeated practice and growing confidence, the student produces an expanded, connected sentence: I love to eat apples because they are healthy and crunchy. The content never changed. The destination was always there. The support made the journey possible (see O — Oral Language).

Working with ENL students means holding ZPD across all four language domains: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Students do not move through all four at the same rate. A student might be further along in listening comprehension than in writing production. Knowing where each student is across all four domains prevents you from teaching to one area while ignoring another.

Background knowledge is one of the most useful tools for locating the zone accurately. A student who cannot explain photosynthesis in English may understand it fully in their home language. That is a language gap, not a content gap. Treating it as a content gap misjudges the zone entirely (see B — Background Knowledge).

Two Moves to Try Tomorrow

1. Locate the Zone Before You Plan

Before each new unit or skill sequence, identify where each student is working independently across speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Use observation, work samples, or a brief informal check. Plan from where students are, not from where the curriculum assumes they are. This does not require a formal assessment system. A quick scan of recent work samples before planning gives you the information you need to pitch instruction in the right place for most students most of the time.

2. Adjust the Support, Not the Goal

When a student struggles, lower the support threshold before lowering the expectation. Add a model, break the task into smaller steps, or provide a word box. The zone stays the same. The path changes. This distinction matters because lowering expectations in response to struggle teaches students that the bar moves when things get hard. Adjusting support teaches them that the destination is fixed and the route is flexible. That is a different message, and students feel the difference (see C — Cognitive Load Theory and M — Models).

Reflection

You do not have to lead students all the way there. You only have to lead them to the next stone.

Think about how consistently you locate the zone across your whole class. Are there students whose zone you know well and students whose zone you are less certain about? What would it take to get a clearer picture of where each student is across speaking, listening, reading, and writing?

A second grader kept spelling jump as jup. Not once. Every time.

You drew four boxes on a small whiteboard. You said the word slowly. J... u... m... p. You slid a chip into each box as you said each sound. Then you handed her the marker.

She said the word. She slid the chips. On the third sound she stopped. Her hand hovered over the third box. She said the word again, slower this time, and her face changed.

The /m/ had been there the whole time. She had never heard it as a separate thing.

She wrote jump correctly for the rest of the year.

Reading instruction asks students to work with something invisible. Sounds move fast, disappear as they are spoken, and blur together inside words. A student who cannot hear the parts of a word cannot map those parts to letters. The gap is not intelligence and not effort. The gap is perception.

Elkonin boxes make the invisible parts visible. One box per sound. One chip per box. Students see structure they could only guess at before, and once they see it, they use it. The routine takes a minute, needs nothing more than paper and a few chips, and works across grades, proficiency levels, and content areas.

Some tools require training and setup and a plan. This one requires three boxes and a willingness to start.

Draw the boxes. Say the word. Hand over the marker.

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Sometimes teachers struggle not because they lack strategies.

They struggle because they have not yet learned how to use themselves well.

What It Actually Is

In every classroom, the most influential instructional tool is not a program, a curriculum, or a framework. It is you.

You refers to your professional judgment, your agency, and your deliberate awareness of what you bring into the room. Knowing yourself as a teacher means understanding your strengths, naming your limitations, and making intentional choices about where to direct your energy.

Your strengths might include your warmth with students, your classroom presence, your creativity, your organizational systems, or your language background and cultural knowledge. These strengths are not universal or standardized. They are personal, contextual, and shaped by your experience.

Knowing yourself also means knowing where you are still developing. The goal is not to eliminate weaknesses. The goal is to be aware of them, work around them efficiently, and grow through them deliberately. This is not about ego. This is about effectiveness.

Why It Matters

Teaching is demanding, dynamic, and cognitively heavy work. If you do not understand how you operate best, you risk spreading yourself thin, trying to teach in ways that work against who you are, or expending energy on things better handled by a system you have not yet built.

The ENL landscape is one of the most dynamic in education. Students arrive with different home languages, different schooling histories, and different levels of literacy in their first language. Research on language acquisition continues to evolve. Policy shifts change what teachers are required to do. Programs come and go. A teacher who stops developing gets left behind, not by choice, but by inertia. Staying current, staying curious, and staying open to critique are not extras. They are part of the work.

Knowing yourself also sets a model for students. When you name what you are good at, acknowledge what you are working on, and show what deliberate growth looks like, students see that self-awareness is a skill, not a fixed trait. That model matters especially for multilingual learners navigating their own strengths and gaps across two or more languages.

These ideas connect closely to three others. Your personality, warmth, and presence directly shape how safe students feel in your classroom, which determines how open they are to learning and taking risks (see Chapter A, Affective Filter). Knowing where you shine and where you will face difficulty before the year begins lets you plan more honestly and sustainably (see Chapter G, Getting Through the Year). And understanding yourself as a professional makes you a more intentional partner in co-teaching, push-in, and collaborative planning relationships (see Chapter J, Joint Partnerships).

What It Looks Like in Practice

Start with a self-inventory. Ask yourself: What parts of teaching consistently energize me? Where do I see reliable success with students? What drains me? Where do I feel least confident? Look for patterns across years, classes, and roles. Past experience is data. Examine it.

Then invite perspective from outside. Ask a trusted colleague or coach: Where do you see me having the most impact? What might I adjust? Outside perspective reveals patterns you are too close to notice.

Not every weakness is worth the same investment. Some gaps are central enough to your work that developing them directly makes you meaningfully more effective. If you struggle to explain phonics patterns clearly, that is a knowledge gap worth addressing. Other weaknesses are better outsourced or systematized. If organization drains you, build a system or borrow one rather than trying to become an organized person from scratch (see R — Routines and U — Utilities and Tools). Knowing the difference between a gap worth growing and a gap worth working around is itself a form of professional maturity.

Two Moves to Try Tomorrow

1. Strengths Inventory

At the start of each year, name three to five things you do well. Write them down. Keep them somewhere visible. Then design your schedule, lessons, and systems to let those strengths carry more weight. This is not a feel-good exercise. It is a planning tool. Teachers who know what they do well make clearer decisions about where to invest time and energy, and where to delegate, simplify, or systematize instead.

2. Track What Drains You

Keep a running note, in a notebook, a phone app, or a sticky note on your desk, of tasks or situations that consistently exhaust you. Look for patterns over a few weeks. Then ask two questions: Is this a gap worth developing, because it is central to my work? Or is this better handled by a system, a colleague, or a different approach entirely? Naming what drains you is the first step to doing something useful about it rather than absorbing the cost quietly.

Strong teachers do not do everything well. They design their teaching lives so their strengths do the heavy lifting.

Look at your current areas of weakness honestly. Which ones are central enough to your work that developing them would make you meaningfully more effective, and which ones would be better handled by a system, a colleague, or a different approach entirely?

Teaching English Language Learners means meeting a huge range of backgrounds, school histories, and needs — and a lot of the guidance out there is either too generic or buried in academic papers most of us don’t have time to dig through.

This 69 page guide turns the research into something usable: the theory behind common strategies, explained plainly (Cummins, Krashen, and more); a map of the program models schools actually choose between; seven classroom strategies you can start using this week; and a decision tree for one of the hardest calls in ELL education — is it a language difference, or a learning disability?

New in this edition: a Before, During, and After Reading Quiz. In the spirit of retrieval practice, these questions prepare you before you read, keep you engaged as you go, and help the thinking stick once you’re done. I’m including a sample below for free, so you can get a sense of them.

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As with the other Read, Write, Howl briefs, this is a starting point, not the final word — a living document I’ll keep refining.

If you find value in this one, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What would help improve it — more languages, more classroom moves, a deeper look at any one section? And let me know what else you’d want to see.

Thanks for your continued interest and support.

I’ve also include a free preview of the TOC and Summary. Subscribe for the whole 60+ page document.

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The ABCs of CBM: A Practical Guide to Curriculum-Based Measurement

by John L. Hosp, Michelle K. Hosp

Are you are planning lessons, running small groups, prepping for assessments, and modifying instruction? All of it matters. None of it feels connected. The ABCs of CBM does not add more work. It aligns the work you are already doing with what you and your students are actually trying to accomplish.

Who This Is For

The teacher who knows their environment, understands the mandates, and still feels pulled in four directions at once. You are not lost. You are missing a framework.

It lands hardest if you have a few years in the classroom already. Not because new teachers cannot use it, but because you need to have felt the cost of misalignment before alignment feels like relief.

If you have ever rushed through curriculum mandates, scrambled into test prep, and then tried to meet individual student needs in small groups, all as separate efforts with no real relationship to each other, this book was written for you.

What It Offers

CBM stands for Curriculum-Based Measurement. Fast, repeatable assessments in reading, spelling, writing, and math that connect directly to what you are teaching. The data is not cold. It is a mirror held up to your instruction.

The authors give you a way to synchronize the three things pulling most teachers apart: what you are required to teach, what your students need, and how they will be assessed. When those three align, the noise drops.

Writing is where I felt it most. Designing practice that reflected the actual format of assessments, down to directions and templates, changed what students could do when it counted. The practice stopped being separate from the goal.

Worth noting for ESL and multilingual classrooms: the third edition, published this past June 2026, added dedicated resources for diverse language populations and social-emotional measures. If you teach multilingual learners, this edition was updated with you in mind.

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How I Found It

An elite teacher I deeply respect pointed me here. Someone who has taught a long time and whose practice changed how I see my own. Their reaction when they found CBM was the same as mine: where has this been.

It clicked immediately. Implementation took longer. Still a work in progress. But that is the point. CBM is not something you install. It is a lens you keep adjusting.

What It Changes

The shift is not in your data. It is in your presence.

When planning, instruction, and assessment point in the same direction, you stop teaching in three separate emergencies. You walk in knowing what you are doing matters, because it reflects what students need and how they will be measured. That is not confidence for its own sake. That is clarity. And clarity is what puts you fully in the room.

The Honest Limitation

The first few attempts feel mechanical. The data raises questions you are not yet sure how to answer. Start in one area before scaling. The framework holds, but only after you trust it somewhere first.

Buy The ABCs of CBM on Amazon

If You Liked This, Try These

• Reading Assessment Done Right: Tools and Techniques for Data-Driven Instruction by Stephanie Stollar and Kate Winn

• Assessing Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: A Practical Guide by Robert L. Rhodes, Salvador Hector Ochoa, and Samuel O. Ortiz

THE STACK REVIEW SERIES

Your Turn

Map one unit this week: what you are required to teach, what your students need, how they will be assessed. Three columns. See where the gaps are. Come back and tell me what you found.

Used CBM before? Reply and tell me what worked and what did not.

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This year you changed the method. You built a simple spreadsheet, a column for each skill, a row for each student. Throughout the day, during transitions and warm-ups, you call out quick checks. “Segment the word cat.” “Give me the first sound in sun.” A yes or no goes in the box. Nothing more.

Within two weeks a map appeared. You saw which students blended with ease and which stalled on segmenting. You saw exactly whom to call on and which skill to ask. Your small groups stopped being guesses. You pulled the four students stuck on the same sound and taught them together.

When your administrator asked about progress, you turned the screen around. The checks told the story, clear rows of growth, no week of testing required.

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Data is one of the more frustrating parts of the job. But opting out is not a strategy.

If you do not choose what data to collect, someone else will choose for you, and those choices tend to serve the institution more than the classroom. Working with data well is a learnable skill, and the skill compounds. When you know what you are measuring and why, planning sharpens, conversations with students get more direct, and meetings with administrators get more confident. Good data serves you, your students, your colleagues, and your school. Not because the data is perfect. Because the teachers holding the data know how to use what they have.

Data done well is not a burden. Data done well is leverage.

Find the full 1 page summary of the article below.

Here are links to the 2 previous free summaries.

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Sometimes students write flat, underdeveloped sentences not because they think in flat, underdeveloped ways.

They have not yet been given the tools to show on the page what they already know in their heads.

What It Actually Is

A kernel sentence is the simplest possible version of an idea: a subject and a verb. The dog ran. The students played. My grandmother cooked. Short, complete, and bare.

Expanding sentences is the practice of taking a kernel and building outward from it in deliberate, structured steps. Students add adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, conjunctions, and appositives, one layer at a time, until a simple idea becomes a detailed, complex sentence.

The approach has roots in writing research going back decades. What makes it valuable for ENL classrooms is how well it fits the work: structured enough to scaffold, flexible enough to differentiate, and concrete enough for students to see exactly what they are doing.

Kernel sentences come from the teacher or from students themselves. Teacher-generated kernels let you control the vocabulary and grammar features in play. Student-generated kernels connect the work to personal experience and background knowledge, lowering cognitive load and raising investment (see C — Cognitive Load Theory).

Why It Matters

Writing instruction often tells students to add details without showing them how. Add more. Be specific. Expand your ideas. These directions are well-intentioned and rarely sufficient.

Expanding sentences gives students a visible, repeatable process. Each step is concrete. Each addition is named and practiced. Students are not guessing what a better sentence looks like. They are building one, piece by piece.

For multilingual learners, this practice addresses a gap that shows up often and gets misread easily. Many ENL students have richer ideas than their written English reflects. Their thinking is complex. Their oral language, in English or in a home language, often outpaces what appears on the page. Expanding sentences builds a bridge between what students think and what they write. Over time, written language begins to catch up to spoken language (see O — Oral Language).

Home language awareness deepens this work. When a Spanish-speaking student writes “the dog old” instead of “the old dog,” that is not a mistake in thinking. Adjectives follow the noun in Spanish. Naming that difference directly gives students a reason for the adjustment rather than a correction that feels arbitrary. Students who see their home language as a reference point learn how English organizes meaning, and they have something to compare it to. That comparison is an asset (see K — Know Your Students).

The routine also makes growth visible. A student who begins the year writing “The dog ran” and ends the year writing “Duke, an old golden retriever with muddy paws, ran quickly across the yard because he heard the gate open” has concrete evidence of development. Students who see their own growth stay engaged with the work (see I — Intrinsic Motivation).

What It Looks Like in Practice

Start with familiar content. The first time you introduce sentence expanding, use something students already know well: recess, lunch, a recent class activity. The goal is for students to focus entirely on the expansion skill, not on generating ideas from scratch.

Two approaches work well depending on where your students are. For beginners and early intermediate students, use question-word prompts: Who? Where? How? Why? The question does the thinking so students focus on meaning rather than grammar terminology. For intermediate to advanced students, name the features directly: adjective, adverb, prepositional phrase, conjunction, appositive. Both follow the same progression, word-level additions first, then phrases, then clauses.

Differentiation within a single session is straightforward. Lower-proficiency students add a single adjective. Intermediate students work up to prepositional phrases. Advanced students reach for subordinating conjunctions or appositives. The same kernel serves the whole group.

Two Moves to Try Tomorrow

1. Kernel of the Day

Put a single kernel sentence on the board at the start of class. Students expand it in their notebooks using whatever features you are currently practicing. Two to three minutes. No more. This builds automaticity through daily repetition, and over weeks, students internalize the habit of looking at a flat sentence and asking what else belongs there.

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2. Oral Before Written

Before students put anything on paper, have them say the expanded sentence aloud to a partner. You circulate and listen. Only then do students write. This sequence separates the demands of language production from the demands of handwriting and spelling, keeping cognitive load manageable (see C — Cognitive Load Theory). For students who need additional support, dictate their oral sentence back to them so they write their own words rather than composing from scratch (see L — Language Experience Approach). Speaking before writing catches errors before they reach the page.

Every sentence starts somewhere. Your job is to show students where to go next.

One question for you

Think about a student whose writing does not yet reflect what you know they are capable of thinking. What would change if that student had a reliable, repeatable process for closing that gap?

Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching

Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury

Are you drowning in materials? Overwhelmed by worksheets, webinars, and curricula that shift before you have finished learning them? Teaching Unplugged offers a way out, not by adding more, but by taking almost everything away.

Who This Is For

This book is for the teacher buried under Teachers Pay Teachers downloads, the one who over-plans and still walks out of lessons feeling like something was off. It is also for the new teacher who has not yet developed the habit of over-relying on materials, because learning this early changes everything.

I first encountered Dogme during one of the most overwhelming periods of my teaching life. I was a new teacher in China with roughly 400 students and a curriculum that could not possibly account for all of them. Teaching Unplugged did not give me a script. It gave me permission to look at what was already in the room and use it.

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What It Offers

Dogme is a materials-light approach to language teaching built around three core ideas: conversation drives learning, language emerges from students rather than being imposed on them, and the teacher’s job is to work with what is in the room, not deliver what is in the binder.

Meddings and Thornbury are not asking you to throw out your curriculum. They are asking you to hold it more loosely. To see your students as a resource. To follow the language that surfaces naturally in a lesson rather than forcing predetermined content through regardless of whether it lands.

This is not a set of activities to copy (although the book is filled with activities of all types). It is a framework for how to see your classroom differently.

The most compelling thing about this book is that Meddings and Thornbury borrowed an idea from outside education entirely and made it feel native to the classroom. That move should inspire every teacher looking beyond the usual sources.

How To Use It

You do not need to go full Dogme. You do not need to apply everything at once. Start with one activity in one modality. Try it in your context. See what surfaces. This is a lifelong adaptation, not a quick implementation.

The teachers who get the most from this book are the ones who read it slowly and let it change how they observe, not just what they do.

Buy Teaching Unplugged on Amazon

If You Liked This, Try These

• Dogme in Practice: Classroom Reflections by Scott Thornbury, Luke Meddings Teachers

• The Minimalist Teacher by Tamera Musiowsky-Borneman and C. Y. Arnold

THE STACK REVIEW SERIES

Your Turn

Try teaching one lesson this week with less: fewer materials, fewer directions, more room for what students bring. Then come back and tell me what you noticed. Have you read this one already? Reply and let me know what landed for you.

And one more question worth sitting with: what field outside education do you think has the most to offer teachers? Let’s brainstorm.

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I can’t wait to give them

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But knowing the background of the field helps us locate our own place in it. It shows us what came before (so we don’t needlessly repeat old pedagogical missteps) and where the field is heading (so we can stay ahead of the curve).

This overview is far from exhaustive. What it offers is a fair range of sources and angles from which SLA has been approached. Beyond the sections on practical takeaways and classroom applications, I hope you’ll find at least one thread worth following for more breadth or depth.

Find the link to the full guide below.

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Sometimes teaching feels like too many demands pulling in too many directions.

Often, what’s missing isn’t more strategies. It’s knowing which demands deserve your energy.

What your why actually is

Your why is your reason for teaching. It is the purpose underneath the planning, the force that keeps you returning when the work is hard, the systems are messy, and the results feel slow.

A why is not a slogan or mission statement. A why is the honest answer to a question most teachers rarely stop to ask: why am I doing this?

Whys take many forms. An educational why centers on building skills. A philosophical why centers on belief: every student deserves quality education and a teacher who cares. A practical why centers on contribution: you support the school’s mission. A pragmatic why is smaller: if you make one student’s day better, that is a win. Some teachers are driven by passion for their subject. Some are drawn to the stability the work provides. None of these is right or wrong. What matters is that yours is clear enough to guide you.

One principle matters above all: your why is a standard you hold yourself to. Not a decoration. Not a performance. A real anchor.

Why your why matters

Teaching is a marathon, not a sprint. And unlike most marathons, this one repeats every year with new demands and new pressures. Without a clear why, it is easy to lose focus and direction.

When you are pulled in too many directions without a clear center, your effort dilutes. You respond to whatever feels most urgent rather than what matters most. A clear why acts as a filter. It helps you decide where to spend your energy and where to let something go.

Your why also guides hard decisions. An administrator approaches you with a task disconnected from students. A colleague dismisses a strategy you believe in. A family pushes back on services you know students need. Your why tells you what to hold firm on and what to let pass.

Your why shapes curriculum decisions too. You are handed a program you did not choose. Your why clarifies how much to adapt, where to push back, and what to build around it to serve students well.

A clear why makes decisions more coherent over time. This consistency builds trust with students, families, and colleagues (see J — Joint Partnerships).

Your why also connects to what data you attend to. When your purpose is clear, you know which numbers serve it and which ones do not (see D — Data). A why becomes a lens that makes information useful rather than overwhelming.

What it looks like in practice

It was a long month, a long week, and a long day. An administrator stopped you in the hallway with a task that felt disconnected from anything you were working toward. The gap between why you became a teacher and what you are actually doing felt widest.

Teachers who get through moments like that draw on something. Not a strategy. Not a framework. A reason. A why clear enough to refocus on when everything else feels like noise.

Clarifying your why begins with naming it. Complete this sentence honestly: “I teach because...” Do not write what sounds good. Write what is true. Your why might be student-centered or subject-centered, idealistic or practical, about access or belonging. Write the version you would say to yourself, not the version for a job interview.

Once named, make it visible. Write it on a card near your desk. Keep it in your planner. Set it as a reminder on your phone. Some teachers write their why as a single sentence. Others find a quote, write a short poem, or even a haiku. The format does not matter. What matters is that it stays accessible on the days when clarity is hardest.

Put your why into practice by using it as a filter. When a new initiative arrives, ask whether it serves your why. When a hard decision arises, ask what your why tells you to do. Not every decision will have a clear answer, but the question itself is useful. It slows the reactive response and brings you back to what matters.

Your why also benefits from time horizons. A daily why is small and concrete: what do you want students to walk away with today? A yearly why holds the arc: what do you want to be true for students by June that is not true in September? Each time frame calls on a different level of your purpose. Together, they form a layered map of what you are doing and why (see G — Getting Through the Year).

Challenge your why periodically. Ask whether your current work actually reflects it. If your why centers on belonging but your classroom runs on compliance, there is a gap worth examining. A why is not a decoration. A why is a standard you hold yourself to.

Living your why does not always mean announcing it. Often it means letting it show through consistent action. Modeling the values you care about. Talking openly about why you make certain decisions when it serves students to know. Letting the choices you make, day after day, reflect what you are actually here for.

Two instructional moves to try tomorrow

1. Write your why in one sentence

Complete this: “I teach because...” Write the honest version, not the polished one. Keep it somewhere visible. Return to it when decisions feel unclear or the work feels heavy.

Honesty matters more than eloquence. “I teach because I want students to feel capable” is as valid as “I teach because I believe every child deserves access to opportunity.” Both are real. Both are actionable.

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2. Use your why as a filter

When asked to take on a new program, responsibility, or initiative, ask first: does this serve my why? If not, consider whether to decline, negotiate, or adapt it so it does. Not every request deserves an equal yes.

This is not about being difficult. This is about protecting focus. Saying yes to everything dilutes your ability to do anything well. Your why helps you say no strategically.

A clear why does not make teaching easier. A clear why makes teaching more purposeful.

One question for you

What are you currently spending energy on that does not align with why you became a teacher, and what would change if you stopped?

Miguel was a first grader with low English proficiency and a head full of stories he had no clear way to get out. So the work happened one step at a time.

He drew his story in four boxes, labeled the drawings, dictated sentences while his teacher transcribed, revised for details, then wrote the sentences himself. His teacher dropped the text into a digital book editor, Miguel recorded himself reading, and the finished book went home by email that night. Miguel listened to his own voice reading his own words. He was proud. His mother wrote back that night, thrilled.

Miguel didn’t write a book by doing everything at once. He wrote a book by doing one thing at a time. That is Cognitive Load Theory in practice.

Some ideas arrive with the force of recognition. Cognitive Load Theory was one of those ideas.

Before knowing the name or the research, you were likely already doing parts of it: pre-teaching vocabulary before a complex text, talking through a story before asking students to write, stripping a lesson down to the one thing you actually wanted students to practice. These were instincts. Discovering Cognitive Load Theory put language to those instincts. Backed by evidence and grounded in how memory actually functions, it is the kind of framework that travels with you through every lesson, every planning session, every moment you catch yourself about to add one more thing.

It makes teaching more enjoyable. It makes learning more possible.

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Find the full 1 page summary of the article below.

Here are links to the 2 previous free summaries.

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This is also my first article and resource behind a paywall, and I’m hoping you will join the journey.

Poetry and ESL is an under-explored but naturally engaging topic. There are many inroads: cultural, personal, phonemics, fluency, vocabulary, just to briefly mention a few.

This guide is meant to give you some direction in pursuing the connections between Poetry and ESL. There is a lot more to say and share (poems, lessons, routines, frameworks), so let this serve as an enticement into a world of possibilities.

As I wrote about the first Read, Write, Howl brief, these are research briefs and starting points for exploration. They are also the results of some of my experimentation using AI to research, collate, design, summarize, etc... Although I have read through all of the content, edited and adapted it. These are not wholly created by me. So take them for what they are. They may also be updated or adapted at any point, as I consider them ‘live documents’.

I’m excited to share this with you and to continue to explore the topic myself. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts, concerns, recommendations or ideas. I’d love to collaborate with others to deepen this field.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Sometimes students know more than they say.

The right words unlock what they already understand.

What vocabulary instruction actually is

Vocabulary instruction is deciding which words to teach, when to teach them, and how to make them stick.

This work includes choosing words worth teaching, breaking words into meaningful parts, connecting sounds to meanings, and giving students tools to own new words independently.

What words deserve instructional time? Tier 2 words appear frequently across contexts and carry academic weight (analyze, compare, evidence). Content-specific tier 3 words unlock particular units (photosynthesis, revolution). Words built from meaningful roots and affixes teach students how language works.

When do you teach vocabulary? Sometimes before reading or writing. Sometimes during reading, when a word blocks comprehension. Sometimes after, when reviewing. Sometimes in the moment, when a word arises naturally.

How do you teach vocabulary? Through routines making words memorable. Through visual supports connecting language to meaning. Through cognates leveraging students’ linguistic knowledge. Through morphology showing how words are built. Through repeated exposure across contexts.

All of these decisions happen intentionally. Vocabulary instruction is strategic, planned, and responsive work.

Why vocabulary matters

Words sit at the intersection of sound and sense, meaning and thought. Students use vocabulary to access ideas, express understanding, and connect new learning to what they already know.

Students arrive with vocabulary. Multilingual learners bring words from home languages, cultural knowledge, and lived experiences. Your job is connecting what they know to English words allowing them to think, write, and speak with precision and confidence.

Word knowledge deepens through connections. Learning one word opens doors to related words. Teaching “un-” as a prefix teaches a generative pattern students apply independently to unlock “unfair,” “unkind,” “untie,” and dozens more. Words compound. One well-taught word becomes ten.

Too often, this work gets sidelined. Pressed for time, teachers skip pre-teaching or assume context is enough. This decision has consequences. Students miss content because they lack the language to access it. They disengage because too many words feel unfamiliar. They write short sentences because they lack vocabulary to express complex ideas.

When vocabulary is taught well, students engage more deeply (see B — Background Knowledge). Words activate background knowledge, making new content feel connected. Pre-teaching key words reduces cognitive load (see C — Cognitive Load Theory). Students focus on ideas rather than decoding unfamiliar language. Vocabulary often builds through oral language first (see O — Oral Language), giving students repeated practice before reading and writing demands increase.

Words are not decorative. Words are the tools students use to think.

What it looks like in practice

Strong instruction happens through intentional routines, strategic word choice, and consistent follow-through.

Establish a simple, repeatable vocabulary routine. Routines save time, build confidence, and make word learning predictable. Strong routines include saying the word clearly, providing a brief definition or visual, breaking down spelling and pronunciation, offering an example, and inviting student use.

Teaching “examine” might look like this: Say the word. Show an image of a scientist examining a slide. Define it: “Examine means to look at something closely and carefully.” Break it down: “Ex-am-ine. Three syllables. Starts with ex-, like exit or explain.” Give an example: “Scientists examine evidence to understand what happened.” Invite use: “Turn and tell your partner one thing you examined closely this week.” This takes two to three minutes. Flexibility within structure allows the routine to serve the word and the students.

Cognates are among the most powerful tools for multilingual learners. Cognates are words sharing origins across languages, often with similar spelling and meaning. English and Spanish share thousands of cognates because both languages draw from Latin roots. “Important” and “importante.” “Music” and “música.” Students literate in Spanish recognize these connections and transfer vocabulary across languages. French, Portuguese, Italian, and other Romance languages also share cognate patterns with English.

Teach students to recognize cognates independently. When introducing a new word, ask speakers of Romance languages, “Does this remind you of a word you know?” Students notice patterns. Over time, they hunt cognates without prompting. Be aware of false cognates. “Embarrassed” does not mean “pregnant” (embarazada in Spanish). “Exit” does not mean “success” (éxito in Spanish). Address these explicitly when they arise, but do not let caution prevent leveraging cognates as a strategy.

Students benefit from learning how words are built from meaningful parts. Prefixes, suffixes, and roots combine to create meaning. Teaching “un-” shows students a pattern unlocking dozens of words. Teaching “-ful” and “-less” allows students to transform “care” into “careful” or “careless.”

Begin with transparent morphemes where the connection between part and meaning is clear. Start early. Even first and second graders work with simple suffixes like -s, -ed, -ing added to familiar base words (jump/jumped/jumping). Segmenting words into morphemes works much like segmenting words into phonemes (see E — Elkonin Boxes). By third and fourth grade, students handle common prefixes like un-, re-, pre- and suffixes like -ly, -ful, -less. Upper elementary students tackle Latin and Greek roots (spect, dict, port). Proficiency level matters more than age. Adjust based on what students control.

Brief lessons work best. Introduce one affix, show three examples, and invite students to generate more. “If un- means not, what does unfair mean? Unkind?” Students apply the pattern immediately. Over time, these patterns accumulate and students decode unfamiliar words independently.

Learning happens through repeated exposure across multiple contexts. Students need to see, hear, and use new words many times before words feel automatic. Include new vocabulary in exit tickets, writing prompts, or brief oral responses. Words stick through use, not through memorization.

Two instructional moves to try tomorrow

1. Daily vocabulary routine

Introduce one tier 2 word each day using a consistent structure: say the word clearly, show an image or give a brief definition, break down spelling and pronunciation, offer an example sentence, and invite student use.

Keep it brief. Two to three minutes builds vocabulary steadily without overwhelming instruction. Tier 2 words like “analyze,” “compare,” “describe,” “examine,” and “tradition” appear in multiple subjects and grade levels. These words carry academic weight and transfer broadly.

Consistency matters more than perfection. The structure stays recognizable. Students internalize the routine, freeing attention for the word itself rather than wondering what comes next.

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2. Pre-teach strategically

Before introducing complex content, identify three to five key words students need to access the lesson. Teach these words briefly before reading or instruction begins.

This reduces cognitive load by addressing vocabulary before students encounter it in context. When students know key words ahead of time, they focus on ideas rather than decoding unfamiliar language. Pre-teaching takes minutes. Without it, students lose access, and entire lessons may be wasted.

Choose words strategically. Teach words essential for comprehension or words students will encounter repeatedly. Not every unfamiliar word deserves instruction. Context sometimes provides enough meaning. Teach words with generative properties (roots, affixes) hold exponential value.

Words allow students to identify, describe, and engage with an expanded world.

One question for you

Which students carry more vocabulary than their English proficiency suggests, and how might recognizing this shift your instruction?

Click on the images below to access new resources.

There are 2 samples of what I will be offering in the Resource Vault for subscribers.

They are 1 page summaries of each chapter from the ABC series.

These have great tips to implement immediately, resources to help you dive deeper, and key points to reference.

What I really love using these for is to share during PD sessions. And I hope to share more ideas on how to use these in the future.

Again, since these are new, I would love any feedback on what helpful, confusing, useful or redundant. Any thoughts are appreciated.

I hope you enjoy and find use for these, and hope you join Read, Write, Howl for more content like this in the future.

The first concerns the “Affective Filter”. And having this concept click into my pedagogy is one of the impetuses to start this project in the first place. Our relationships with students are foundational to our teaching, and the Affective Filter is a powerful tool for consider this.

The second is “Background Knowledge”. This is a powerful concept which deepens our understanding of who are students are and what resources (and knowledge) they are bringing into the classroom. And also is paramount in having them connect with and learn new content and skills.

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Big things are coming. Here’s what’s on the way.

• One-page summaries of ABC series to share with colleagues

• An English Phoneme Articulation Guide

• A resource pack for using poetry in ESL

• A guide to applying Rosenshine’s Principles of Mastery to your own teaching

• And more on the way

The goal: one new resource every week.

Research is one of the most powerful tools we have as teachers. It sharpens our practice. It backs up our instincts. It gives us language for what we already know works.

I’m sharing research briefs and resources with subscribers — shaped by what I’m exploring and what you ask for. Some I’ve built from scratch, some with AI, some a mix of both. All of it designed to be useful in the real world.

I want these to be starting points, not endpoints. Dive in, follow a thread, let an idea take you somewhere unexpected.

These are living documents. They’ll grow and evolve — just like our practice.

The first resource? Free for everyone.

Teachers have been asking for practical, ready-to-use guidance on teaching English sound articulation. I built it. It covers best practices, contrastive analysis tools, and assessment strategies for new students — everything you need to get started with confidence.

Find it here: Articulation Guide

Thank you for being here. Read. Write. Howl.

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Teachers have asked me for clear guidance and instructions they can use to teach articulation of English sounds. I developed a resource that provides that and more: best practices for articulation practice; quick and effective contrastive analysis information and assessment for new students, and more.

ARTICULATION GUIDE

ARTICULATION GUIDE (PRINT FRIENDLY)

This is part of my new project to share more resources and research, which you can read about HERE.

Since this is the first resource I’m sharing, if you find value or are interested in it, I would love to hear your thoughts. What can help improve this- more languages added, more teacher moves, further reading section?

Also, let me know what resources or guides you might want to see that align with what you’ve seen from Read, Write, Howl. Thanks for your continued interest and support.

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