In “Life, Literacy, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Supporting Our Immigrant and Refugee Children Through the Power of Reading,” principal Don Vu explores six conditions he believes are necessary to create a schoolwide culture of literacy that includes and engages all students.
Using Google Sheets is an efficient way to keep track of student data and meet other progress monitoring needs, writes NBCT Kathleen Palmieri. Once the initial set up is completed, you’ll find many uses for this quick data check that justify your time investment. Here’s how!
When Dina Strasser feels at a loss or stymied in something she is trying to do for her students, she often turns to her list of options to gets things done – developed during her 20 years working with school districts and their occasionally labyrinthine bureaucracies.
Want to differentiate instruction while assuring rigor? Create a 3-D portrait of each of your students using a mix of formal and informal strategies. Teaching expert Barbara Blackburn has tips for gathering insights about background knowledge, culture, and growth mindset.
Being a STEM teacher in 2022 will likely be a new experience every day, even for veterans, writes curriculum designer Anne Jolly. To help out, she suggests ways STEM teachers can care for themselves and ways to sustain kids’ STEM skills, sharing many resources that can help.
Teacher and coach Stephanie Farley discovered through trial and refinement that a good rubric is “a tool to provide feedback to kids about their progress toward mastery of a learning target.” See her five backward planning steps and the resulting three-part writing rubric.
A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts offers a winning combination – a structured lesson approach, a range of suggested mentor texts, and an overall message adaptable to specific students. Teachers at multiple levels of experience will find it invaluable, writes Sara Pennington.
Active listening is a key skill for school leaders, especially when faced with the need to mediate complex or volatile issues. Consultants Ron Williamson and Barbara Blackburn describe 5 barriers to effective listening and 10 tips to help every leader become more successful.
Short-term projects with specific techniques and ample examples fill Shelley Harwayne’s book, Above and Beyond the Writing Workshop. Helene Alalouf recommends the book’s authentic and interesting writing assignments complete with scaffolds and templates.
A former English teacher, Megan Kelly is eager to discover how she can incorporate the learning power of storytelling into history units. As a first step she created a transmedia storytelling experience that had summer camp students exploring where ‘history’ comes from.
