Many millions of people who tune in to the 2019 Super Bowl will be there to watch the pricey, high-engagement commercials. Media literacy consultant Frank Baker explains how to teach about these “super ads,” approaching them as informational text worthy of close scrutiny and analysis.
Book Reviews / Professional Development
by MiddleWeb · Published 01/24/2019 · Last modified 01/17/2020
While the goal of Fulfilling the Needs of Teachers: Five Stepping Stones to Professional Learning is worthy and the content well organized, the book’s professional learning model seems overly complicated and difficult to understand, writes teaching coach Ronda Clark.
Class Starters / Wide Open Learning
by Megan Kelly · Published 01/20/2019 · Last modified 03/02/2024
We all want our students to begin class motivated to learn and brimming with questions about the topic. To do this, Megan Kelly modifies an IB idea: the provocation, a quick activity designed to engage the students and get them wondering. Check out all her ideas!
Librarian and NBCT Amy Klein teaches in a growth mindset school and finds Creating a Growth Mindset School by Mary Cay Ricci a perfect book for administrators who want to better understand how growth mindset works, how to establish such a school, and how to sustain it.
To help students with special needs succeed, Blackburn and Witzel explain how rigor, RTI and MTSS can go hand in hand. The authors detail how RTI’s tiered interventions work with MTSS’s focus on core instruction for all students, writes doctoral student Bryndle Bottoms.
Ask teachers for some Do Now synonyms and they’ll come up with terms like Warm-up, Quick Review, and First Steps. Teaching coach Sarah Tantillo’s favorite is Brain Defibrillator. When done right and used routinely, she says, Do Nows establish a norm of urgency in your class.
How do teachers recharge regularly? Rather than mediation and exercise, Rita Platt finds what works for her is getting a daily dose of “gut-busting laughter.” And guess what? Laughing as self-care is a scientifically proven strategy! She offers laugh inducing resources.
Facilitating science-based research around real world problems empowers students through the skills they acquire and the subject knowledge they gain, says teacher Angela Duke. And what better topic than climate change? “The environment of the future will be theirs to live in.”
Students can become thriving writers using the 27 frameworks included in this book. The lessons provide learning about language, learning through language, and using language to learn about self. Literacy coach Pam Hamilton highly recommends the “so, so practical” book.
Building Empathy / Future of History
by Sarah Cooper · Published 12/30/2018 · Last modified 12/01/2019
While photos and texts can bring alive an issue one medium at a time, reality-based comics have the power to drop us into a story both visually and verbally. Sarah Cooper’s eighth grade students learned that lesson when they followed the trek of Syrian refugee Mohammad.
