Category: Articles

Making Room for Poetry in Standards-Based Classes

How often do you share poetry with students? Reading interventionist and literacy coach Gwen Flaskamp shows how increasing students’ experience with poetry can build literacy, analytical and social-emotional skills and help meet Common Core standards.

Teaching Media Literacy: It’s the Diet Ad Season

What does the annual avalanche of diet advertising mean to the classroom teacher? It’s a teachable moment, says media literacy expert Frank Baker — an opportunity to sharpen visual literacy and critical thinking skills and bring the Common Core standard for argument writing into play.

Teaching in High Gear: The Classroom Coach

In her new book Teaching in High Gear, middle school teacher Marsha Ratzel describes a transformational journey, marked by a gradual shift toward student-driven learning and energized by a global network of collaborators. In this excerpt, Marsha describes how her development of a “coaching mode” helped students become more self-reliant learners.

Updating Our Recipes for Learning – and Biscotti

Whether it’s Grandma’s biscotti recipe or a lesson plan, adding new ingredients (like digital tools) shouldn’t distract from the end result you seek, says teacher and technology consultant Mike Fisher. “The modern mindset is really about willingness, not digital knowledge. It’s about trying new things and exploring new tools and avenues for instruction WITH the students rather than FOR the students.”

The #1 Close Reading Skill

Literacy expert Sarah Tantillo shares an essential strategy in helping students become close readers, with help from Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

STEAM & Media Literacy

Media literacy consultant Frank W. Baker considers some of the ways that media arts intersect with STEM and present STEAM learning opportunities.