The Drama Book a great resource for introducing drama into the ELA classroom, especially for inexperienced teachers who are unsure how to best tackle it. It offers practical teaching advice and amazing lesson plans, writes middle school teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith.
Spring arrives a day early this year, and testing season won’t be far behind. No matter a teacher’s opinion of standardized testing, most will be engulfed in the annual ritual soon. Curtis Chandler distills strategies to help teachers and students cope successfully.
Understanding concept words like ‘innovative’ can help students to make sense of complex sources. Britany Harris and Sunday Cummins share a four-step process to introduce a few new vocabulary words before reading an information text and then focus on them as kids read, talk and write.
Are students who increasingly communicate through bits of digital text missing the chance to develop live conversation skills? In her middle grades classroom, Nancy Costanzo has crafted strategies to help kids both deepen their understanding and become skilled conversationalists.
Helping the many kids who seem to struggle with attention is what Teach for Attention! is about. Formatted into 7 power-packed chapters, the book offers methods, tools, and strategies to help all students become engaged learners who like school, writes principal Rita Platt.
In Measuring What We Do in Schools, assessment expert Victoria Bernhardt provides a framework schools can use to evaluate and reconfigure plans for continuous school improvement. Doctoral student Scott Holcomb highly recommends the text’s clear and practical models.
I Will Screw This Up / YA Reviews
by Dina Strasser · Published 02/19/2020 · Last modified 09/03/2020
Acknowledging that as a white woman of privilege she cannot fully experience the depth of meaning in Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, ELA teacher Dina Strasser shares four takeaways from her limited perspective as an educator and lover of speculative Young Adult fiction.
Retention / The Unstoppable ML Teacher
by Valentina Gonzalez · Published 02/16/2020 · Last modified 02/29/2020
Talk of grade retention revs up each spring. But it’s seldom a good answer for English learners. EL expert Valentina Gonzalez shares research that debunks the idea that retention helps ELs and suggests ways to boost their academic progress all year long.
Help middle graders connect past and present using the easy-to-understand lessons in Hands-On Archaeology. Teacher educator Linda Biondi says the authors show us how giving kids opportunities to ‘dig’ in and out of class can build team skills and cross-curricular learning.
As we move into the 2020 presidential election, questioning what we read and hear is paramount. In the fake news era, are students learning how to verify what they consume? Media literacy expert Frank Baker doesn’t think so and says it’s up to educators to teach them.
