Nicholas A. Emmanuele (he/him/his)

You have until March 17 to submit a proposal to #CEL26. Share your literacy leadership work, question, processes, and knowledge with fellow leaders. Extend your #NCTE26 stay or come to #Philadelphia just for CEL!

ncte.org/groups/cel/c...

Making Instructional Coaching Standard for Every Teacher Instructional coaching works best when it is normalized as part of everyday professional life, not positioned as a corrective measure.

“In our experience, coaching works best when it is normalized as part of everyday professional life, not positioned as a corrective measure.”

Here’s how schools can reframe instructional coaching as collaborative problem-solving. 🤝

#InstructionalCoach #EduSky

Still time to register. Hope to see you on Monday. I’ll be sharing a lot of resources - many free - that I use in my own classroom to spark conversations about civics and the constitution.

An Unconventional Seating Plan Designed to Benefit Focus and Learning After years of search and experimentation, this teacher finally hit on a room layout that allowed for efficient shifting between whole class, small group, and independent work.

Are you a teacher who thinks a lot about your room layout? We’ve got diagrams!

@mrrablin.bsky.social shows you how he moves easily between whole class, small group, and individual work. 🪑

#ClassroomDesign #EduSky

What Worries Me About Teachers’ Use of AI A high school teacher reflects on how adult choices around AI use—particularly their approaches to transparency and focus on efficiency—can affect classroom culture.

As always, here's @marcusluther.bsky.social with a truly excellent piece on @edutopia.org! In education, we talk about the time about teachers modeling learning and behavioral habits for kids. Marcus applies that same idea here to our AI use.

www.edutopia.org/article/teac...

New tools for understanding AI and learning outcomes OpenAI introduces the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite to assess AI’s impact on student learning across diverse educational environments over time.

Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...

Text from OpenAI article on its educational programs: "Agency does not emerge from basic AI use alone. Students must progress from simple tasks to deeper applications such as studying, building, creating, coding, and managing agents. But among college-age users, we see a widening global “capability overhang,” defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users still operate roughly 90% to 99% below how power users of ChatGPT are engaging with our tools. Educational institutions play a central role in closing that gap. Faculty and educators can help students harness AI’s full potential by embedding authentic AI use cases into coursework—assignments that use AI and mirror real professional work, such as analyzing a market, designing a product concept, evaluating a policy trade-off, or building a simple agent"

Shouldn't let OpenAI puff about education get to me, but its claim students need AI skills for future jobs and "agency", then letting slip it really means making students into GPT "power users", and making that an educational imperative, *and* planning to measure it ... 😦 openai.com/index/ai-edu...

Going Gradeless Requires Both Addition and Subtraction — Grow Beyond Grades Although most gradeless teachers engage in “subtraction,” removing traditional grading from our classrooms, we also need “addition” in the form of new infrastructure that connects our individual effor...

If you never get started on building infrastructure, the change you desire will never happen. And infrastructure building is a collective enterprise, not an individual one. —Barry Fishman growbeyondgrades.org/blog/additio...

Jason Reynolds on What Fires the Imagination of Young Readers The best-selling author on why "inappropriate" topics may be exactly what teen readers need, and the importance of raising the hair on the backs of readers' necks in the first 50 pages.

On a very hot day in June, I took a risk. I made a beeline to the front of the room at ISTE so I could shake hands w/ Jason Reynolds.

Nervously, I blurted out, "I know you have to leave, but my editor would never forgive me if I didn't ask to interview you."

My latest for @edutopia.org:

Colleges See Spike in Students With Disabilities, Including Elite Schools

They are clearly trying to whip up a moral panic about disability accommodations but this article doesn't include any data on accommodations.

If you are having someone else do your lit review--and I mean LLM but also research assistants, honestly--you didn't review the lit, you don't know the field, you know someone else's view of the field. That seems like a problem, like a constructing a strawman problem. With LLMs, it's worse.

Gratitude to five wonderful years of Heartdrum! Together, we're making the world of books better for young readers. Mvto/thank you for your ongoing enthusiasm and support! www.harpercollins.com/pages/childr... #KidLit #YALit @harperkids.bsky.social @weneeddiversebooks.bsky.social

Whether it’s educational research from 1958 or 2026, researchers conclude again and again that regular education teachers report the need for more training to feel successful in inclusive classrooms (for students with disabilities). We matter progress, and…

#inclusion #disability

I went into the year wanting to lean into in-class writing more than ever, especially for assessments—but @thevogelman.bsky.social had some thoughtful pushbacks on this emphasis.

(Full conversation comes out tomorrow morning! 👀)

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.

Writing is thinking.

It makes me feel old to say, but I’m seeing apathy toward work. Grades (or low/missing grades) see to spur the doing of the work (I still don’t view grades as motivation of learning, just of doing).

I was doing holistic scoring last semester where I’d update their overall letter grade weekly.

Our gradebooks are forced at 25% formative, 65% summatives, and 10% final exam. I was having some work completion issues and struggling to get the level of reflection I had seen before, even after I revised my approaches.

If the gradebook wasn’t updated every couple days, work completion lagged.

Since yesterday, the Einstein AI cheatbot website underwent some rebranding. The tagline changed from "Einstein does the busywork so you don't have to," to "Einstein is the personal tutor every student deserves." In the FAQ, "How does Einstein do all this?" became "How does Einstein help me learn?"

I’m tinkering with traditional grading again since I got new students at the semester change (going gradeless wasn’t working with recent groups).

Wow! I forgot that one aspect I hate of traditional grading is how easily one score can change a student’s average!

I’m intrigued how the title uses “teach” but the subtitle uses “assign.” I think those are different questions.

I’m intrigued how the title uses “teach” but the subtitle uses “assign.” I think those are different questions.

A blue graphic showing the state of Florida, with the text "Let's talk about 'government speech'" and the AABB logo.

A thread about on ongoing suit in Florida that could have massive free speech & censorship implications. Get informed. Tell your friends.

I had not considered adding *something* about generative AI into collective bargaining agreements, but now I’m thinking…

I have swung too far into a skills-based ELA curriculum. I didn’t want only old books, so we went to literary devices applied to some choice reading & I leaned into sentence styles and modeling writing.

Together, it feels… not quite joyful right now.

Back to the drawing/chalk board…

A figure of bubbles connected by lines that move from left to right. Factors affecting reading motivation is divided into three categories. Those categories then break down once or twice more. Goals are performance or mastery based. Beliefs might be beliefs about self that can be measured as self-efficacy, self-concept, or agency. Beliefs can also be beliefs about reading which are measured by expectancy or value. (Pre)dispositions are attitude or interest, which is then situational or individual.

I really enjoy Conradi et al.’s (2014) hierarchy of motivation-related constructs. Motivation is multifaceted—student readers are not just “motivated” or “not motivated” to read.

I am in agreement with you. My school is aiming for the option of Sem10, Lit, then Lang. We also have traditional academic (college prep) and honors options. College Board is compelling to many, I guess.

I agree that curriculum is more. I guess I mean that I see many schools use the courses as a sequence and as a guide to what students will experience in a grade. AP Lang or SP Seminar is a heavy nonfiction and writing focus, which will lead to curricular decisions.

“Curriculum” in the sense of a sequence of branded courses. But yes, there is flexibility within it. Our school will have flexibility in the ELA 10 portion definitely.