School leader DeAnna Miller remembers the geometry class of her teens as an unwelcoming place with low expectations for most students. She agrees with Stanford’s Jo Boaler that math can be a more vital and engaging subject when teachers help students adopt growth mindsets.
Staying abreast of cutting edge research is challenging for busy educators. Curtis Chandler spotlights two areas of current study that really impact student success – Trauma Informed Pedagogy and Collective Teacher Efficacy – and shares his own wish list for future inquiry.
Lately Michelle Russell’s students aren’t just talking about how anxious math makes them; many are lamenting about how boring math is. Beyond trying to make math fun via puzzles and games, she’s now looking for methods to spark more intrinsic interest in the world of numbers.
The new edition of Debbie Silver’s Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8 is an essential handbook for adults who want to help kids become committed, continuous learners. NBCT Kathie Palmieri finds the book’s attention to self-motivation, ZPD and growth mindset particularly helpful. Highly recommended.
Involving your students in creating public service announcements (PSAs) not only promotes media literacy, writes Frank Baker, it builds teamwork skills, energizes kids to conduct research into authentic social issues, and gives them opportunities to write with real purpose.
Novels in verse offer quicker reads with instant character connections, vivid imagery, pathways to complex issues, strong narratives, and much more. ELA teacher Kasey Short shares how to use them in class and introduces lots of titles for your middle graders.
Using Google Sheets is an efficient way to keep track of student data and meet other progress monitoring needs, writes NBCT Kathleen Palmieri. Once the initial set up is completed, you’ll find many uses for this quick data check that justify your time investment. Here’s how!
MiddleWeb has published about 1100 reviews of professional books for teachers and school leaders since 2012 – each written by a K-12 educator. In this article we’ve curated our 23 most-read reviews posted during 2021. Click on a headline to read our reviewer’s take on the book.
A former English teacher, Megan Kelly is eager to discover how she can incorporate the learning power of storytelling into history units. As a first step she created a transmedia storytelling experience that had summer camp students exploring where ‘history’ comes from.
Close Reading the Media / New Vocabulary
by Frank Baker · Published 01/09/2022 · Last modified 01/10/2022
Metaverse? Prebunking? Zombie claims? The rapid evolution of digital technology and methods of persuasion has unleashed a flood of words and phrases that need to be in students’ vocabularies. Media literacy expert Frank Baker offers examples from across current culture.
