Category: Articles

7 Principles of a Heart-Centered Classroom

Educator and author Regie Routman considers heart-centered principles that can help us go a long way to ensure that what we do and are asking our students and loved ones to do will result in personal and professional growth, gratitude, generosity, and even sparks of greatness.

12 Idea-Packed Posts about Teaching Poetry

National Poetry Month is here! If you’re once again rushing to pull together some poetry lessons – or perhaps feeling a bit guilty because you’ve put poetry aside in favor of more high-stakes ELA topics – take a look at these easy-to-use resources.

Use ‘Say Something’ to Boost Reader Response

During this reading activity, partners think out loud, supported by active listening, to deepen their individual and shared understandings. Rather than reading without focus, this strategy teaches students to attend to their reading by stopping to “say something” at intervals.

Teach the Writer First and the Writing Second

Recognizing the gap between formal curriculum standards and the emotional and organizational hurdles of writing, Matt Renwick shares some of his ideas for student-centered strategies that acknowledge these challenges and equip students with tools they need to overcome them.

Teaching: The Best Job I Never Wanted

Stephanie Farley was a reluctant adventurer 30 years ago when she took a teaching job “until something better” came along. To her surprise, she discovered a career that has given her the gifts of meaning, mastery and connection – “a powerfully engaging, ever-evolving vocation.”

Teaching Study Skills Middle Schoolers Need

Academic success relies on students taking charge of their learning. To achieve that goal, kids must learn to organize and study effectively. G/T Facilitator Sharon Ratliff shares strategies she uses to introduce and implant essential study skills in the middle school years.

Build a Classroom That’s Resilience-Friendly

All students can learn how to pick up the pieces after they face adversity, disappointment, loss, or trauma and go on. They need our guidance to find healthy ways to move forward. Debbie Silver offers six strategies educators can use to create classrooms that foster resiliency.

5 Questions to Help Kids Become Critical Readers

Marilyn Pryle’s five crucial questions help students become critical readers in the Age of Disinformation as they learn to look more deeply into any text, in any form, and see the influences around it, the voices and sponsors, the craft and rhetoric, the intent and message.

How Teacher Notebooks Can Help Students Learn

When we have students watch us write in our teacher notebooks about what we’re reading, we not only share our expectations for their notebook-keeping, we give them a mental model for writing critically and analytically about what they read, says literacy leader Laura Robb.

How to Differentiate the Teaching, Not the Task

Mona Iehl once labeled her math students high, medium or low and gave them different problems. Now she thinks about differentiation as the amount of support she offers so that every student gradually reaches grade level expectations working the same problems. Here’s how.