When your students read, view, and listen to multiple sources on a topic or issue, do they tackle each source in a silo? Martha Polley and Sunday Cummins share Martha’s dive into helping students think across history sources, synthesizing to deepen their understanding.
Future teacher Kara Tyler recommends Determining Difference from Disability to help teachers and parents respond to linguistically, culturally and socio-emotionally diverse students. Tyler appreciates the book’s opportunities for reflection and the range of resources.
Helping students learn to read and love to read are two of the most important jobs of any teacher in the middle grades. You can’t do either without having robust libraries with books of all types, subjects, and levels. NBCT Rita Platt can help you build your collection.
In Becoming a Transformative Leader Carolyn M. Shields makes the case for equity and justice in our schools and suggests practical ways to examine them more deeply with colleagues and to assess progress toward achieving them, writes educator Chris Dransoff.
Add dimension to student book talks with Lynne Dorfman’s version of the Book-in-a-Bag project. And it works online, as students introduce their books by sharing a paper bag covered in images they recreate from fiction or nonfiction and by pulling out representative objects.
In response to the sudden shift to remote learning, history teacher Sarah Cooper has jettisoned her usual fourth-quarter Civil War unit and launched an opportunity for her 8th graders to create podcasts on challenging events in US history. Here’s the project in process.
If you’re interested in doing some professional learning at home in addition to the on-the-fly learning that comes with reorganizing your classes so they are distance-friendly, take a look at Principal and NBCT Rita Platt’s collection of online and web-free PD resources.
Articles / Future of History / Pandemic Activity
by Lauren S. Brown · Published 04/10/2020 · Last modified 04/15/2020
The global pandemic “will be in the history books, won’t it?” Absolutely, 8th grade teacher Lauren Brown told her students. She’s devised a simple home assignment – students create a ‘primary source’ for future historians by jotting down their questions, concerns and observations. See her suggested prompts to get kids started.
This is not a casual, read-in-an-afternoon book. It is more like a math master class filled with ways to deepen students’ understanding through a problem-solving approach. Veteran math teacher Michael Hernandez highly recommends its tools and models from start to finish.
If co-teaching is a practice of sharing the classroom and students, what happens when our classroom is literally beyond the walls that usually hold us together? UDL coach Elizabeth Stein brings together current ideas about how to best serve students amid Covid-19, including those with special needs.
