Building on her previous writings redefining rigor in education, teaching coach Barbara R. Blackburn shares fresh tools, strategies, and insights to add rigor to your teaching in ways that are meaningful, engaging and appropriately challenging for all students.
As a part of a teacher’s overall classroom assessment, we want students to ask themselves questions. Encouraging students to assess themselves adds some extra rigor to the learning process and helps grow an important life skill. Barbara Blackburn shares four simple strategies.
Learning scientist Karin Hess shows how STOP and THINK activities taught through collaboration and critical thinking before, during, and after each lesson can build a deeper, more meaningful understanding of skills and concepts than traditional end-of-class exit cards.
Aimed at middle and high school educators, 5 Questions for Any Text by Marilyn Pryle presents a structured yet flexible approach for helping students move beyond surface-level comprehension toward deeper analysis, reflection, and awareness, writes Melinda Stewart.
Dale Ripley helps readers delve into crucial methods for positively leveraging student learning, classroom behavior, and relationship development with tactics including handling bias, influence and motivation. The book offers many reflection opportunities, says Trishauna Pulos.
When we shape our teaching practice around wholeness, we intentionally deepen the presence of social-emotional learning in our classrooms. This deepening allows us to connect to ourselves and to our students. Sabrina Winkleman shows the importance of reflection in the process.
Julie Hasson looks into how teachers benefit from regular reflection on changes, challenges and celebrations to better understand experiences, choices, and consequences. Along with regulating, relating and reframing, reflection can help us recharge and build greater resilience.
As students experience physical and emotional changes as part of adolescent development, body image can become a complex and sensitive topic. Reading books that explore body image can help. Kasey Short shares some favorite titles and questions for reflection and discussion.
The more Kasey Short considers joy when planning lessons and responding to students, the more everyone enjoys time together and the more they learn. Her joyful tools include celebrating, sharing ‘fun’ texts, students choosing music, moving indoors and out, laughing, and more.
Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy offers ways to elevate meaning, reflection and joy so readers can offer cultural and historically responsive teaching most effectively. Sarah Cooper calls it “one of the most beautiful, inspiring, actionable books about pedagogy I’ve ever read.”
