Building Community / Wide Open Learning
by Megan Kelly · Published 09/19/2022 · Last modified 07/11/2024
With the goal of having new middle school students feel seen as individuals while also feeling like a part of something bigger, Megan Kelly organized group activities for all the students across her sixth grade team. The games can be expanded or contracted to fit your time.
Barry Gilmore’s Plagiarism: A How-Not-To Guide for Students helps learners understand the motivation behind plagiarism and discusses ways to avoid it in both academic and employment settings. Eighth grade teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith also recommends the teacher’s edition.
When Stephanie Farley coaxes her students into a good frame of mind – happy, relaxed, confident – they learn more, just as positivity research predicts. Join her as she shares 10 joy-inducing methods – including dogs – and suggests ways to reach across content.
Lisa Eickholdt and Patty Vitale-Reilly’s favorite student collaboration is the Writing Club – an opportunity for kids to write in authentic, engaging, and creative ways. They prepare a foundation for this work with read-alouds, feedback structures, partnering activities, and more.
The first step to taking control of your time is making the effort, and educator Frank Buck’s “Get Organized Digitally!” provides the rungs of the ladder to get you there. Department chair Stephanie Choate says Buck inserts educator success stories in just the right places. Highly recommended.
Unexpected events in classrooms steal precious teaching time and lead to frustrated students and teachers. Expected routines provide comfort and familiarity so students can focus on the challenges of learning new things. Teacher Kelly Owens shares her routine-building strategies.
Consultants Ron Williamson and Barbara Blackburn counsel that dealing with change promptly, engaging actively in social media, and achieving work-life balance are central tasks that will help school leaders not only survive but also thrive as they run this year’s marathon.
Fresh teaching ideas engulf math teachers each fall. Which strategies take priority as we seek to help students have the best year ever? Teacher and coach Mona Iehl recommends three: build classroom community, review and augment resources, and select engaging lesson formats.
We Belong by Laurie Barron and Patti Kinney offers a community-forward approach to classroom management that promotes a culture in which schools become “places where [students] can discover who they are and who they want to become” through the year, writes Michael McLaughlin.
In this unprecedented school year, as teachers and school leaders set goals and decide what to keep and what to change, Lynne Dorfman and Aileen Hower argue that “it is social-emotional learning – not academics – that should be the focus for the first month of school.”
