You’re entering the final stretch of teaching your 2017-18 students. The school year is more than halfway through, winter vacation breaks are over, and you might be feeling a tinge of burnout. Jenny Grant Rankin shares strategies to help you thrive before summer arrives.
How can teachers help students become deep thinkers and creative problem solvers – skills needed to solve the pressing challenges facing global societies? STEM provides a pathway. Expert Anne Jolly poses 11 questions that can help teachers design effective STEM lessons.
Future of History / Learning from Students
by Sarah Cooper · Published 02/27/2018 · Last modified 03/01/2022
Sarah Cooper’s eighth graders take a “Bread and Roses” metaphor from the Progressive Era to the fight for the ERA – making insightful comparisons Cooper had not anticipated. “Giving students room to make their own connections meant that they could teach me,” she says.
It’s difficult to learn from someone we don’t trust, writes literacy consultant Regie Routman. Bonding with individual students and their families builds that trust. Routman offers 10 ways to make sure that none of our students ever become “mostly silent and unseen.”
In Enticing Hard-To-Reach Writers, Ruth Ayres offers wide ranging ideas and resources to help all students become writers because “when writers believe their words matter, nothing can stop them.” We begin, reviewer Mary Langer Thompson notes, by getting our hearts right.
Messaging Matters provides practical notions and step-by-step models to strengthen communication and build a positive culture with your students, parents, and community. And you can implement them almost immediately, writes school counselor Wendy Adams.
Teaching Mistakes / Working Draft
by Kevin Hodgson · Published 02/19/2018 · Last modified 12/14/2019
Kevin Hodgson remembers vividly the day when what seemed like a fantastic new idea for exploring word origins with his 6th graders fell apart rather quickly and left him in a panic. He shares this and other memorable missteps over the years – and some lessons learned.
Mindfulness, teacher self-care, and increased job satisfaction for teachers are currently hot topics. Teacher librarian Rita Platt finds Lisa J. Lucas’ helpful book, Practicing Presence, a welcome addition to the conversation about Social Emotional Learning for educators.
Book Reviews / Passion Based Learning
by MiddleWeb · Published 02/15/2018 · Last modified 11/17/2019
In “The Passion-Driven Classroom: A Framework for Teaching and Learning” Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold provide an inspiring and practical resource for educators who embrace or want to explore the student-centered focus of passion-based learning, says Jacie Maslyk.
Photos, zipper baggie quilts, stick puppets, story time capsules and more – all add to the learning in Simmons and Guinn’s collection of hands-on activities for kids in K-5. Educator Elizabeth OBrien says activities can be easily adapted from one subject area to another.
