With increasingly limited time in schools to support staff and students, curating a collection of concise strategies can facilitate deeper coaching conversations to improve the craft of teaching. Teacher and coach Amy Tucker has found a timely resource in The Instructional Playbook.
Michael McLaughlin reviews Brad Johnson and Hal Bowman’s Thank You, Teacher, a collection of 100 letters written by educators for educators with the aim of uplifting, affirming, and celebrating “the incredible work of our profession.”
Traditional vocabulary strategies are passive exercises that have little impact in the long run, write Lynne Dorfman and Aileen Hower. Students need lots of exposure to a word before they can fully understand and apply it. They need frequent, engaging and meaningful encounters with words.
Imagine an activity that takes little class time but engages students in current events and encourages them to speak with their families about what’s happening in the world. Teacher Megan Kelly longed for just such an activity and finally found it in “fantasy geopolitics.”
Alyssa Hadley Dunn’s Teaching on Days After offers research and narratives on how teachers can respond equitably on days after cataclysmic events so that they and their students “reach the full measure of their humanity.” Sarah Cooper recommends Dunn’s pedagogical strategies.
Digital literacy leader Brett Pierce lays out the elements of digital storytelling and shows how students can take the lead in using digital tools to collaborate, think critically, problem solve, and present publicly, creating digital narratives around core curricular goals.
First and foremost, writes EL expert Valentina Gonzalez, new teachers need to view multilingualism as a student asset. Learn her five proven strategies to achieve teaching success with multilinguals, who need to be valued, respected and supported to master academic content.
Drs. Tamra Stambaugh and Emily Mofield go beyond the usual guidance on differentiation for gifted and advanced learners, providing teachers with useful graphic organizers, project ideas, and sample complex questions in multiple K-12 content areas, writes NBCT Kim Rensch.
Laura Robb has long championed the idea that reading and access to books are civil rights. In this story of turning around reluctant readers, the celebrated educator makes a powerful case that when kids have lots of book choices and lots of time to read in and out of school, they’ll become readers for life.
To move beyond traditional classroom discussion focused on answering a few teacher questions, Dr. Barbara Blackburn advocates student-driven discourse that emphasizes “on-task” talk and academic vocabulary. The result: purposeful dialogue leading to deeper understanding.
