Reading / The Unstoppable ML Teacher
by Valentina Gonzalez · Published 12/02/2018 · Last modified 11/27/2019
Whether a student is an English learners or native English speaker, the strategies EL specialist Valentina Gonzalez offers will provide support for middle graders who are struggling to read text on grade level. Insight: Often we must help unlock the new language.
How can we talk about giving students voice without thinking about oral communication? That’s the most important way humans express opinions and share knowledge, says veteran teacher-consultant Erik Palmer. Learn why he believes all students can become better speakers.
Executive Function / It's Not Easy Being Tween
by Cheryl Mizerny · Published 11/19/2018 · Last modified 02/17/2024
Drawing on her special education background, ELA teacher Cheryl Mizerny works to build kids’ executive function skills. Here she offers techniques to help strengthen what she considers the most crucial skills for middle schoolers: task initiation, organization, and time management.
Being mindful of what is driving the decisions we make as educators is valuable. A good place to start is by defining our own core values. New principal Rita Platt shares a method for distilling those values and tells how she applied hers to several school decisions.
Educator Sarah Cooper finds herself gravitating to teaching books that call our social consciences awake, as Sara K. Ahmed’s Being the Change does as it asks teachers to be even more human in the classroom and thus impel your students to share their humanity with you.
Kids love visual texts such as art and photographs, but as with written texts, they often don’t know where to begin when asked to look at the works critically. Author and NBCT Marilyn Pryle finds that if given specific doorways, her students have much richer discussions.
Whatever you know, sharing it outside school walls can inform policymakers, journalists, the public, other teachers, researchers, and professors – who can use your classroom discoveries to better serve students. Educator and writer Jenny Grant Rankin shows how.
Responsive Literacy’s 400 pages are well worth the read, writes Linda Biondi. Each of the contributing teacher educators present a theoretical framework and practical tools to apply in the classroom and guidance on how to help young students develop a love of literacy. Five stars.
Create Compose Connect / Literature Circles
by Jeremy Hyler · Published 11/07/2018 · Last modified 12/04/2019
Jeremy Hyler found Harvey Daniels’ classic Literature Circles inspiring, but was left wondering how he could get his seventh graders to continue discussing books outside of class with the energy of book club members. Here’s how he took circles online with digital tools.
Current Events / Future of History
by Sarah Cooper · Published 11/06/2018 · Last modified 11/17/2019
After three hate crimes in one week in late October, 8th grade teacher Sarah Cooper came in on Monday ready to talk, “to imagine how we could react in healing ways.” Yet, as her first class began, “I realized this conversation would be different. As a Jew, I felt shaken.”
