During this reading activity, partners think out loud, supported by active listening, to deepen their individual and shared understandings. Rather than reading without focus, this strategy teaches students to attend to their reading by stopping to “say something” at intervals.
While making sure middle school students are media savvy is critical and the ideas in The Media-Savvy Middle School Classroom are supported by solid theory, educator Megan Balduf finds some lesson plans too esoteric for the middle school classroom and a packed ELA curriculum.
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.
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.
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.
What can you and your students accomplish the last few weeks of school? In this MiddleWeb resource educators share activities that align learning with fun, offer ideas for responding to stress, and suggest strategies to help sustain your classroom community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
