Teaching and learning in grades 4-8

Teaching Study Skills Middle Schoolers Need

Academic success relies on students taking charge of their learning. To achieve that goal, kids must learn to organize and study effectively. G/T Facilitator Sharon Ratliff shares strategies she uses to introduce and implant essential study skills in the middle school years.

Build a Classroom That’s Resilience-Friendly

All students can learn how to pick up the pieces after they face adversity, disappointment, loss, or trauma and go on. They need our guidance to find healthy ways to move forward. Debbie Silver offers six strategies educators can use to create classrooms that foster resiliency.

5 Questions to Help Kids Become Critical Readers

Marilyn Pryle’s five crucial questions help students become critical readers in the Age of Disinformation as they learn to look more deeply into any text, in any form, and see the influences around it, the voices and sponsors, the craft and rhetoric, the intent and message.

The Democratic Roots Essential to Literacy

In Literacy’s Democratic Roots: A Personal Tour Through 8 Big Ideas, Thomas Newkirk brings his enormous experience and wisdom from writing and teaching over many decades to his exploration of the connections between literacy education and democracy, writes Laurie Miller Hornik.

How Teacher Notebooks Can Help Students Learn

When we have students watch us write in our teacher notebooks about what we’re reading, we not only share our expectations for their notebook-keeping, we give them a mental model for writing critically and analytically about what they read, says literacy leader Laura Robb.

How to Differentiate the Teaching, Not the Task

Mona Iehl once labeled her math students high, medium or low and gave them different problems. Now she thinks about differentiation as the amount of support she offers so that every student gradually reaches grade level expectations working the same problems. Here’s how.

Taking Small Steps to Build Research Skills

Research is a muscle Megan Kelly’s 6th grade social studies students are still building, and just like muscles, their skills get stronger with repetition. The goal is to make sure that the repetition isn’t tedious. Here are some ways she’s improving students’ research savvy.

How to Reclaim Your Energy, Passion, & Time

In Educator Bandwidth, Jane Kise and Ann Holm provide ways to reclaim your energy, passion and time and to gauge your bandwidth with a survey. Factors include balancing priorities, focusing through mental habits, fueling your brain, and more, writes educator Stephanie Choate.

Why I’m Keeping My Classroom Door Open

Dina Strasser has noticed a tangible impact when her classroom door is closed on a regular basis, as security suggests. “I am isolated, physically and socially.” Students are less likely to wander in. Teachers to wave or stop by. So she’s leaving it locked but open. Defiantly.