As Mary Tarashuk leads her fourth graders into full-time virtual learning, insights gleaned from the writings of Diane Ravitch and Rosita Boland are helping her see how the pandemic’s sudden jarring changes could lead to a rebirth of public education in the years ahead.
Future teacher Kara Tyler recommends Determining Difference from Disability to help teachers and parents respond to linguistically, culturally and socio-emotionally diverse students. Tyler appreciates the book’s opportunities for reflection and the range of resources.
Our deep dependency on media for everything from news and entertainment to mail-order buying underscores the urgent need for K-12 educators to make media literacy an essential part of the curriculum in today’s schools, writes author and consultant Frank W. Baker.
Helping students learn to read and love to read are two of the most important jobs of any teacher in the middle grades. You can’t do either without having robust libraries with books of all types, subjects, and levels. NBCT Rita Platt can help you build your collection.
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.
Design thinking allows students to own the knowledge they’re acquiring by connecting content in meaningful ways to their homes, the activities they engage in, their reasons for learning, their transformative life experiences, and their special attributes. Dr. Lindsay Portnoy explains.
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.
Mary Tedrow shows how to cultivate students’ individual relationships with writing using a low stakes approach called a Daybook – a safe, authentic space for students to write and think that can feed into other disciplines and writing genres. Ariel Sacks calls it her “new top resource.”
It’s amazing to think – with all the digital tools we have at our disposal – that genuine communication is more difficult today than ever before. Yet that’s our reality, says middle grades teacher Jeremy Hyler, at school and at home, with students, parents and colleagues.
Math teacher Robert Kaplinsky wanted his students debating about the best way to solve a problem, using strategic thinking and not just the formula. He also wanted to know when students had misconceptions so he could reshape his lessons. His solution? Open Middle Math.
