Peg Grafwallner’s Ready to Learn is packed with ah-ha moments and resources to help any teacher up their game using FRAME: Focus, Reach, Ask, Model, and Encourage. Rita Platt feels the common sense approach to framing lessons will build student buy-in and deepen learning.
Reflective and restorative practices are not new, writes middle school administrator Sara Johnson, but the pandemic has created an even greater need to view discipline as a tool to guide and support the social-emotional learning of tweens and teens. Here’s how Sara does it.
When students try to write a short response to a fact-filled passage they’ve read, some will likely lose their grounding. How do we help them leap the gap between reading and writing? Alicia Genchi and Sunday Cummins share an essential scaffold for building the bridge.
What if a STEM project became a product kids make for actual use? Anne Jolly shows how industry’s Product Design Process (PDP) expands upon the familiar engineering design popular in STEM classes, giving students new skills as they move from prototypes to the marketplace.
When the goal of argumentation is to learn from each other, the task becomes less competitive and more enriching. SS/ELA teacher Megan Kelly uses games to help students build socratic skills as they consider perspectives, identify their audiences, and argue with insight.
Alex Valencic began his career sending work home with his students without much thought. Over the years he came to question the need for homework at all – until parents rebelled. Then he invented the Homework Menu. And embraced the D.E.L.I.B.E.R.A.T.E ideas of Erik Youngman.
Teacher Gillian Mertens and her colleagues recommend educators do more than help students debunk social media misinformation they find. Instead, the goal is for students to recognize why the information was believed by so many people, thereby developing greater resistance for themselves.
In The Playful Classroom Jed Dearybury and Julie Jones offer a playful guide written in a playful style with all the research and resources to create a classroom where students will be filled with joy as their learning and soft skills skyrocket, writes Laura Von Staden.
In an era of ‘writing to text’ and responding to prompts, students may not eagerly respond to our invitations to “write free!” ELA teacher and cartoonist David Lee Finkle uses an interest based mapping strategy to convince his writers they have something worth writing about.
High interest text sets tied to essential questions and in varied formats help emergent bilinguals stick with a particular topic as they learn how to read strategically. Elizabeth Hagan and her colleagues brought Malala Yousafzai to students’ attention with a range of sources.
