If you are teaching in a low-performing, high-poverty school, Eric Jensen’s Teaching with Poverty and Equity in Mind is a must read, writes Anne Anderson. Jensen begins with the process of teachers adopting an equity mindset and offers proven tools to support all students.
Math students in the middle grades want the truth: “Why should math matter to me?” To show them, curriculum leader Christian Polizzi suggests making real-world connections, asking students for examples in their own lives, and having them create “personalized” math problems.
Cutting-edge teachers never answer the question “why do we need to learn this” with vague references about an unlikely future, writes curriculum coordinator Alex Valencic. Instead, they provide “instant relevancy” and respond with immediate examples from our lives today.
Articles / Questioning / remote learning
by MiddleWeb · Published 11/02/2020 · Last modified 11/29/2020
Effective questioning during remote learning doesn’t require new strategies. Consultant Barbara Blackburn suggests building questions with higher order thinking models; including questioning stems; adding cubing for student choice; and having students source their answers.
Issues students wrestle with in the traditional classroom may be magnified during online learning. To address them, we need to adapt our regular classroom strategies to help students succeed. Teaching expert Barbara Blackburn looks at six common issues.
On each page of History Class Revisited, teacher Jody Passanisi reveals a deep knowledge of middle school minds and hearts and offers many engaging strategies to help students on the way from literal to critical thinking about history, says reviewer Sarah Cooper.
Future of History / Making History Meaningful
by Lauren S. Brown · Published 09/05/2016 · Last modified 12/11/2019
How do we overcome the perception that history is boring? Connecting the past directly to students’ life experiences is a flawed strategy, history educator Lauren Brown believes. Teachers should focus less on “relevant” and more on “meaningful” and “interesting.”
Like many other teachers, Curtis Chandler is trying to uncover all he can about learning and cognition to better understand and serve his students. Here he shares 3 brain-savvy teaching principles – beginning with the primacy-recency effect – drawn from recent research.
Sarah Tantillo offers more sage advice on how to write lesson objectives that get students’ brains racing. In this post, the literacy consultant explains why objectives must always have a compelling purpose – offering two stories from her own classroom observations.
