While coping strategies can help those facing burnout, teaching careers are more sustainable when educators also slash workload and stress-inducers. Jenny Grant Rankin looks at the burnout pandemic and urges teachers to reduce grading and focus on planning quality lessons.
Katie Caprino offers three ideas for using Zillah Bethell’s YA novel The Shark Caller to engage your middle grades ELA students in social emotional learning. Caprino’s activities build on how the young characters interact as they face the impact of deaths in their families.
Articles / Civics and Current Events / Media Literacy
by MiddleWeb · Published 09/25/2022 · Last modified 07/31/2023
As disinformation proliferates, schools need a better solution than perfunctory media literacy education, say these digital citizenship advocates. When students achieve full “media fluency,” they will not only understand disinformation exists but have the tools to outflank it, write McCusker, Irvan and Driscoll.
In The Power of Teaching Vulnerably David Rockower explains how personal, relational, and dialogic vulnerability can help educators build healthy classroom dialogue. Amy Estersohn would have liked more guidance for teachers facing job loss if they discuss sensitive topics.
Culturally Responsive Teaching in Gifted Education is an essay collection addressing a variety of populations and will benefit all students, says History and ELA teacher Megan Kelly. She highlights three, including “Promoting Racism: Through the Eyes of a Black Mother.”
Many school problems are social at their core. When teachers and counselors give students a leadership role in normalizing the problems – making them accessible and resolvable – the community culture improves for everyone, says national counseling leader Jean Peterson.
Content Learning / The Unstoppable ML Teacher
by Tan Huynh · Published 09/18/2022 · Last modified 01/26/2023
Teaching academic content is less about receiving students who are ready to learn and more about creating conditions to support learning. Tan Huynh shares a geography lesson he designed to meet three conditions multilinguals need to learn content and language simultaneously.
Barry Gilmore’s Plagiarism: A How-Not-To Guide for Students helps learners understand the motivation behind plagiarism and discusses ways to avoid it in both academic and employment settings. Eighth grade teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith also recommends the teacher’s edition.
Grandin & Moore’s Navigating Autism invites readers into that perfect space for learning between familiar territory and new information, writes middle school dean Bill Ivey. The nine mindsets explored can benefit kids on the spectrum as well as the whole spectrum of kids.
This school year the chronic student supplies problem has been worsened by lack of school funding, inflation, increasing expectations for digital devices, and the pandemic’s devastating financial impact. Middle grades teacher Dina Strasser shares one equitable solution.
