Teaching and learning in grades 4-8
Idaho teacher educator Curtis Chandler sees several pandemic positives: Improved teacher attitudes towards digital tools; educators who are more skillful using and troubleshooting tech; and a significant shift toward teaching methods that better engage and involve students.
From a drawing to a book, Maria Walther and Karen Biggs-Tucker trace a 5th grader’s growing creativity, curiosity and individuality. Discover their innovative ways to streamline literacy instruction while offering students opportunities to follow individualized learning paths.
Creating assessments in multiple languages means encouraging students to use their home language throughout the assessment process. Tan Huynh shares seven ways, including conferencing and self-assessing, to embed home languages into evaluations.
In her book Stephanie Affinito brings together the importance of reflection and the need to examine our classroom practices. She provides a framework for celebrating our reading and writing lives and offers ways we can help our students develop these habits for themselves.
Reading books written for today’s middle schoolers helps teachers gain insight into the different ways students experience their adolescence. ELA teacher Kasey Short spotlights 21 novels, memoirs and collections that explore a wide range of race and gender issues and social-emotional challenges.
As school leaders begin typical summer work, they will need to include recovery strategies that identify effects of the pandemic and address emerging issues. Ron Williamson and Barbara Blackburn share key areas of focus to help teachers and students thrive in the new normal.
Each educator braving the gauntlet of Covid-era teaching has been stressed and stretched to wits’ end. It’s time to collect the payoff from this strenuous work. Curtis Chandler relates 5 questions teachers asked themselves during the crisis. “If we begin the new school year with solid answers, we’ll be rewarded.”
In Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, Alex Shevrin Venet has written not only to inform us but also to call us to reflect and take action, writes middle school leader Bill Ivey, who anticipates readers will evaluate their practices to find areas for improvement.
Asking three basic questions can help middle grades readers connect with informational texts and make sense of their meaning. Literacy consultant Sunday Cummins describes several classroom-tested steps that can aid students in identifying and analyzing new information in nonfiction material.
To cope with the next iteration of our world, students will have to master the art of continual learning. Fresh from a lengthy stint writing workplace-savvy STEM curriculum, Anne Jolly has insights educators can use to reboot teaching and help students better create their future.