What would it be like to spend time together with colleagues on a regular basis to learn and improve our teaching skills? To investigate that question, Anne Jolly embarked on a year-long, onsite action research project to design and test a middle school teacher collaboration process.
Intentional Moves: How Skillful Team Leaders Impact Learning is a treasure for any educator who coaches, is a team leader, an administrator or spends a significant amount of their time working with professional colleagues, writes adult learning consultant Cathy Gassenheimer.
Taylor Swift is back on stage with her 2023 New Eras tour, rekindling the fervor of her school-aged fans. You can bring Tay Tay to ELA class with ideas from Patty McGee: selecting TS songs to understand a fictional character, analyzing her lyrics in several formats, and more.
Book Reviews / Social & Emotional Learning
by MiddleWeb · Published 03/16/2023 · Last modified 04/01/2023
Social-Emotional Learning Starts with Us by DiFazio and Roeser offers SEL stories from educators, experts, and students, along with grade-level activities. The authors not only share their knowledge and expertise, writes consultant Anne Anderson, they share their hearts.
If educators are serious about teaching critical skills and serving the whole child, they need to get serious about SEL education and “make it a core and central organizing principle for middle school programs,” writes teacher, principal and leadership mentor Jason Ablin.
I Will Screw This Up / Technology
by Dina Strasser · Published 03/12/2023 · Last modified 05/21/2023
If we teach writing right, we’ll be fine with our kids having access to ChatGPT, says ENL/ELA teacher Dina Strasser. ChatGPT is a machine, following a formula. “It is not a student in a learning community.” She shares several instructional strategies to AI-proof your classroom.
Brittany Collins, the founder of Grief-Responsive Teaching, has taken her own personal experience as a grieving student and skillfully woven it together with knowledge of pedagogical practices and extensive research on navigating loss. For all educators, writes Sara Coppola.
The flash fiction format is engaging, appealing, and motivating to students and to teachers, precisely because of its brevity, accessibility, and manageability, writes teacher/author Linda Rief. “For the first time I am finding joy in hearing and reading my students’ fiction.”
Students continue to struggle with the effects of trauma from the pandemic and their lives outside of school. To help school communities support healing and growth, four authors suggest strategies and policies based in research and their own experiences, writes Brenda Yoho.
If you want to expand your students’ modes of writing (whether or not you use writer’s workshop) Angela Stockman’s book offers great information and insight, says Megan Balduf, including the details of multimodal composition and appendices filled with powerful instruction.
