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.
When stay-at-home kids (or students) need an engaging project to grab their interest, introduce them to creating STEAM-y musical instruments they can craft from household items. STEM educator Anne Jolly shares ways to help 4-8 graders try out ocean drums, panpipes and more.
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.
Middle schools and their students are special. By design 6-8 grade schools are intended to be communities, organized in houses or teams as the kids are exploring themselves and their world. All this helps in the leap to online school, says teacher Laurie Lichtenstein.
Science teachers know that some students believe in often-ridiculous theories (the Earth is flat; climate change is a hoax) that are propagated on YouTube and social media. Frank Baker provides a wealth of resources to fight science ignorance with media literacy skills.
