Guest posts by expert educators
When we over-guide our math students, we don’t build understanding, we replace it, writes veteran teacher, author and math coach Pamela Seda. “We want students who, after leaving our class, can find their way – not students who are dependent on a voice telling them where to turn.”
Whether they’re annotating for current engagement or as preparation for discussion and writing assignments, students benefit from knowing the purpose of their notes. Seventh grade teacher Laurie Miller Hornik shares steps to help students understand the power of annotation.
After her close study of insights from three leading math educators, Kathleen Palmieri took “a deep dive into what I had been doing in my classroom and flipped the stage to create a Thinking Classroom for my students.” See examples of how she’s moved from theories to practice.
Brief reflections every day can help you build your resilience skills, write Carol Moehrle and Gail Boushey. They suggest a practice concentrating on balance, calm, adaptability, happiness, and joy to quietly change how you experience everything teaching asks of you.
Across classrooms, it is increasingly common to see students skim instead of read, search instead of think, and move quickly through text without following how ideas connect. This is not simply a motivation issue. It’s a cognitive one. Veteran educator Holly Durham has a cure.
What AI has done in its teacher assistant role this year has been transformative for teacher leader Katie Durkin. It’s helped her save time by generating ideas for formative assessments, giving her more time to provide students personal feedback – “a feat for any English teacher.”
Thanks to her “joyful” journey from traditional to competency-based grading, teacher and instructional coach Stephanie Farley has seen not only more growth of skill among her students but also increased competence, “which increases confidence, which increases resilience.”
In a world saturated with misinformation, teaching students how to research isn’t just about completing an assignment. It’s about helping them become independent investigators who “pursue truth even when we aren’t there to guide them,” says Curtis Chandler. AI adds to the urgency.
In our math classrooms, writes Mona Iehl, we’ve often trained students to look for what to do instead of making sense of what the problem is actually saying. When they see fractions, they search for a rule. But what if the goal is not to decode but to understand the situation?
“We are all lacking community, despite our illusion of connectedness,” writes teacher Amber Chandler. In her new book, she explores key issues by writing letters to five stakeholder groups she believes can help reclaim connection. Read what she says about school attendance.
