Tagged: teaching tips

15 Ways to Teach and Learn with Sticky Notes

“In my classroom, sticky notes earn top honors for Best Multipurpose Teaching Tool,” writes literacy teacher Kelly Owens. She displays 15 ways to use the tacky squares to chunk large tasks into manageable clusters and empower students to contemplate, coordinate, and connect.

Let Your Students Figure Out Their Misconceptions

Instead of giving middle graders the right answer after they cling tenaciously to their misconceptions, devise processes that lead them to discover the fallacies on their own. Literacy interventionist Kelly Owens shares some cross-curricular tools and strategies that can help.

26 of Our Best Posts for New MS Teachers

MiddleWeb is filled to the brim with resources and helpful ideas that new middle grades teachers will find valuable. We’ve selected 26+ articles that might be especially useful to newbies before (and after) they greet their students at the classroom door for the first time.

18 of Our ‘Long Reads’ You Probably Missed

Did the sheer exhaustion of teaching in 2021-22 cause you to take a pass on some good but long MiddleWeb articles? Here are 18 insightful posts covering a wide range of topics that you might want to look over, in the calm before the next storm.

Learning the Secrets of Good Class Discussions

One area of Matt Smith’s teaching “that has improved tremendously since my novice days” is facilitating productive discussions. Students need to engage in active talk to process complex ideas. This won’t happen until teachers master “wait time” and stop affirming too much.

How to Teach for Real Life Learning

Teaching experts Annette Breaux & Todd Whitaker are back with more teaching ideas from the 2nd edition of Seven Simple Secrets. This time it’s advice on keeping instruction real for today’s students. Read the classroom tales of Teacher A & Teacher B.

What an Effective Teacher’s Classroom Looks Like

Teaching experts Annette Breaux & Todd Whitaker contrast the typical characteristics of effective and ineffective classrooms using two simple but compelling bullet lists. Excerpted from the 2nd edition of their bestselling book Seven Simple Secrets with new teachers especially in mind.