Let us know if you’d like to stay connected with updates, information, and notifications of new content.
Top 10 Reasons to Start a Book Study!
We’re book lovers, for sure. We’ve got stacks of books on our counters, our tables, and our nightstands. Our bookshelves are filled to overflowing, the delivery person keeps delivering new books that have fallen into our shopping carts! We do lots of kinds of...
Learning on the the Go – Six Shifts Podcast Series
In a fast-paced and over-scheduled life, finding any margin between the activities that begin when your alarm goes off in the morning and end when you lay your head back down on the pillow at night can feel almost impossible! If you’re like us, you probably wish you...
Overcoming Overwhelm by Finding Entry Points
What prevents us from making the changes we want to make in our lives? Whether in our personal or professional roles, we all have visions of reaching for our better selves. Whether we want to eat better, keep a tidier house, get in shape, read more. . .the list goes...
5 Keys to Creating a New Habit that Sticks
Did you ever really surprise yourself? This summer Kari did. She did it by water skiing 70 days in a row! She didn’t originally plan to go for 70 days. In fact she still has a hard time believing she did it. If you had said to her in July, “Kari, you should ski 70...
Instructional Levers for Making Work Easier
Who doesn’t want to make their work easier? Our ancestors certainly did. If necessity is the mother of invention, then the need to lift heavy objects led to the invention of the lever. A lever is--as you well know--a simple machine that makes work a lot easier. With...
Inside-Out Literacy
Whether it’s broccoli in the teeth, frosting on the chin, a shirt inside-out, it often takes someone else - with honesty and caring - to help us notice what we haven’t yet seen for ourselves. As we dig deeper and deeper into the wide body of research that shows us...
Background Knowledge: A Key to Reading Comprehension
All children love to become experts! Whether learning about ancient Egypt in order to understand the latest Rick Riordon title or building knowledge about the spread of germs in a global pandemic, knowledge building is a critical aspect of reading comprehension. In...
Talking With Children In Ways that Support Comprehension
Have you noticed? Kids love to talk. Babies come into this world naturally wired for language development. They are ready to soak up new words through exposure, modeling, and feedback. From our first breath to our last, we humans are wired to be language learners. ...
Avoiding Walls and Building Bridges
In our experience, putting up walls is easier than building bridges . . . Just not nearly as helpful. A while back, Marnie Ginsburg of Reading Simplified called us “bridge builders,” referring to the way our work seeks to connect reading communities that are often...
Commitments to Ourselves and Each Other
Change can be challenging. Especially when you are shifting long-held beliefs and practices. Sometimes regret gets in our way. Sometimes overwhelm. Sometimes fear. And while it is good to acknowledge and make space to process these feelings, camping out with any one...
Shifting the Balance: Answers to Some Important Questions
The work we do is driven by a deep respect for and belief in teachers and children. Our goal is to share our admiration for teachers while also supporting substantive change by making information accessible. We actively practice attuning to both the technical and...
A Message to Literacy Educators from Jan and Kari
Dear Literacy Educator, Our little book, Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom, is just that--a little book. Short. Easy to read. Accessible. Most importantly, it is an invitation to balanced literacy...
Let us know if you’d like to stay connected with updates, information, and notifications of new content.