"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

For the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful.  This post first appeared in 2022.

geralt / Pixabay

For many student, especially English Language Learners, it can be very valuable to review a text multiple times – especially in content classes.

It can’t just be re-reading it, though, time and time again.

BORING!

Each “touch” on the text needs to be for a different reason and, ideally, done in a different way.

Of course, this is also the idea behind “close reading” (see The Best Resources On “Close Reading” — Help Me Find More).

Here’s sequence I often use in my ELL History and Government/Economics classes to promote this idea of “multiple touches” (by the way, I first heard this phrase by Kelly Young, who was a talented literacy coach who worked with our school and others) on the same text.

1. A peer tutor, or a more English-proficient student, reads the first page of one of our textbook chapters to a small group.  He/she then will read sentences from that page as students will write them on mini-whiteboards without looking at the book, and the reader will check each one.  Students will then write a summary of that page.
2. Students in the group will then take turns reading paragraphs aloud in the rest of the chapter, and the group will work together to write summaries of each page.  Generally, students will take turns reading a couple of sentences from each page for others to copy on their whiteboards.
3. We’ll then play a game where I ask questions about the content of the chapter, and each group writes the answer on a whiteboard.
4. Students next write several multiple choice questions from the chapter and, from there, I choose the ones to use on a test.
5. Students take the test.  We’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the importance of retrieval practice (see The Best Resources For Learning About Retrieval Practice), so students know to first try answering the questions without looking at the book, and then they can double-check their answers by lookin in the book (with no penalty).

So, as you can see, students have to make multiple touches on the same text, but for many different reasons – first reading, copying down on whiteboards, game, coming up with test questions, and answering them.

What are your suggestions for other ways to encourage these kinds of multiple touches?

     

Mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature.

You can see all my “Best” lists related to education research here.

Here are some new useful studies (and related resources):

Again, the Very Serious edu-pundits who like to say that “higher pay won’t matter [if you don’t do this other thing I want and/or because teachers aren’t in it for the money]” are wrong and you shouldn’t listen to them.

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— Paul Bruno (@paul-bruno.com) March 11, 2026 at 4:32 AM

Fail, flip, fix, and feed – Rethinking flipped learning: A review of meta-analyses and a subsequent meta-analysis

“On average, schools that improve students’ longer run outcomes the most are those that improve their 10th-grade test scores and increase their college plans the most.” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1…

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— Morgan Polikoff (@mpolikoff.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 7:31 AM

I’m adding this to The Best Posts & Articles About Why High School Exit Exams Might Not Be A Good Idea:

Impact of Removing Exit Exams on Graduation Rates journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3…

“Removing exams led to increases in school-level ACGR of 3 percentage points, with the limited English proficient ACGR…projected to increase up 15 percentage points at 4 years after exam removal.”

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— Paul Bruno (@paul-bruno.com) March 15, 2026 at 1:33 PM

Research Bite #59: The impact of distractor processing on semantic memory retrieval is from Tips For Teachers.

Greater autonomy need satisfaction with a little help from my friends: a randomized control trial to increase peer-directed agentic engagement

     

obpia30 / Pixabay

Daylight Savings Time ends on November 1st.

You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About Daylight Savings Time.

     

Your Students Are Stressed. You Can Help Them is the headline of one of my recent Education Week columns, a guest post by Elise White Diaz.

Teachers can guide students out of survival mode and into readiness for learning.

Here’s an excerpt:

     

You Should Turn Students Into Detectives. Here’s How is the headline of one my recent Education Week columns.

The case for bringing inductive learning into your classroom.

Here are some excerpts: