Teaching and learning in grades 4-8

Help Your Students Avoid Collaboration’s Downside

While there are times when consensus makes sense, collaborative experiences are often most beneficial when they center on open-ended questions that invite students’ thinking. Teaching coach Gravity Goldberg shares ways to encourage exploration and creative expression in groups.

Math Facts Fluency Fun to Round Out the Year

Teacher and coach Mona Iehl loves ending the school year with a choice-driven math fact fluency challenge. Students solidify their fluency before the next grade while also engaging in a fun initiative. Discover her simple 4-step process and check out the resources she shares.

Teach Social & Emotional Skills through Poetry

When students learn to identify and name the ideas and emotions in poetry and share their own emotions through writing poems, they better understand their feelings and build empathy and understanding for others. Teacher leader Kasey Short shares methods and lots of poems.

How Reimagining Book Clubs Deepens Learning

If you’ve found class book clubs frustrating, it’s time to read Sara Kugler’s Better Book Clubs. She guides teachers through each step in developing clubs that will help students want to read and talk about books. Literacy leader Sarah Valter highly recommends this resource.

What Kind of Feedback Best Motivates Students?

Teachers are feedback machines – “we do it all day long!” – writes classroom teacher and popular blogger Larry Ferlazzo. Here he focuses on ways to give feedback that’s particularly effective at enhancing students’ sense of competence and encouraging intrinsic motivation.

Kids Loved Our Tasty Middle School Elective

“And the winner is… Moose on the Loose!” Students cheered and lined up at the ice cream cart for a scoop – a product of collaboration, market research, and community partnerships. Middle school teacher leader Jeny Randall shares the story of a successful business elective.

Empower Students to Become Lifelong Readers

Authentic Literacy Instruction cuts through the literacy fog and all the opposing claims about reading instruction to present practical, actionable techniques teachers can use with any curriculum in grades 6-12, says ELA/reading teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith.

Invite Your Students to Peel Some Poems

Ramp up poetry positivity with the Peel the Fruit activity from Project Zero. Throughout the year NBCT Kathie Palmieri helps her fifth graders uncover layers of poetry understanding and then invites them to write their own. Their current favorite: the Intimate Object Poem.