Patti Drapeau provides the research base and the tools for teachers who truly want to move their students from engagement to empowerment and to upgrade their instruction from differentiated to personalized learning, writes teacher educator Sarah E. Pennington.
Sparking Student Motivation is a tool-rich resource that educator Sarah Pennington recommends to any teacher who is open to deep self-reflection and ready to make changes in their practice and classroom culture that will increase student engagement with learning.
Podcasts / Reading for the 21st Century
by Alex Valencic · Published 03/08/2021 · Last modified 03/09/2021
Professional books play an important role in every savvy educator’s growth and development. Podcasts can serve the same purpose, writes instructional leader Alex Valencic. Podcasts not only stimulate our thinking, they lead us to new authors and help us expand our PLNs.
Michelle Russell loves teaching statistics and her students enjoy it too. But it took her a few years to find activities that really engage them and that also reinforce the statistics standards they need to learn. Here are three ideas she recommends for the middle grades.
Differentiating Instruction with Menus: Literature (3-5) provides a variety of excellent activities to involve students in thoughtful and purposeful engagement with and response to texts. Some teachers may wish to substitute more diverse texts, writes Sarah Pennington.
Overcoming the sense of intimidation she’d felt in the face of the US Constitution’s immensity and importance, Sarah Cooper has found fresh ways to draw her 8th graders into the power and complexity of our divided government during this year’s remote learning.
Copious fiction and nonfiction reading can make most teachers better teachers, writes principal and former reading specialist and librarian Rita Platt, by modeling the joy and power of reading in our own lives. Rita shares two dozen multi-genre favorites she read this year.
Current Events / Future of History
by Sarah Cooper · Published 11/04/2020 · Last modified 01/05/2021
Here’s how Sarah Cooper taught her 8th grade social studies class today, as the nation went about determining a presidential winner. Unlike the day after the 2016 election, “I’m feeling not so much shock as the need to shore up my teaching and once again dig into difficult topics.”
When we find time in our busy school day to introduce a current event text, like a magazine cover, we’re actually helping students understand how images are used to communicate and even manipulate. Frank Baker shares a resource-rich pandemic media literacy lesson.
April Wells tackles inequity in gifted education by sharing the story of an urban district that redesigned its gifted programs and took aggressive steps to remedy the lack of racial, economic and language diversity. Teacher educator Sarah Pennington finds the book timely.
