Every summer, we develop the upcoming year's elementary schedule with several priorities in mind:

• Mathematics, Science, Social Studies

• Specials

• Lunch and Recess

Everything is important, and the first thing I schedule is the literacy block.

And the priority within the literacy block? Independent reading and writing.

I share this as I continue to learn about schools that schedule everything except time and support for students to read and write independently.

I'm still trying to understand what it is some educators are hoping to accomplish. Do they believe that by teaching for 1-2 hours with few breaks and lots of skill/strategy lessons, that students will just apply what they learned to their own reading and writing? As I shared yesterday, schools are making, what they believe, explicit instruction actually implicit by separating literacy instruction from what it means to be a reader and writer.

Why do we fill up the literacy block with lots of teaching and not enough reading and writing?

Because we lack confidence in ourselves as educators.

This lack of confidence can be represented in a variety of ways, such as:

• feeling guilty about allocating time for kids to read and write,

• not conferring because it is too messy and time-consuming, or

• citing the curriculum resource and associated assessments as the reason for staying on script.

It always comes down to the same issue:

Having more faith in others - a self-described expert or a publishing company - than what we know to be true.

To be fair, some literacy educators don't know what they believe, or they haven't taken the time to study reliable literature, or they work under leadership that does not value their own expertise.

To this, I encourage anyone to reflect on their own literacy lives and ask: what made you a reader? A writer?

Mostly, time and a desire for reading and writing! So too for our students...