Inclusion / It's Not Easy Being Tween
by Cheryl Mizerny · Published 12/31/2018 · Last modified 11/12/2019
Former special education teacher Cheryl Mizerny says the same techniques used to help kids with dyslexia succeed can benefit all students in the core subjects. Now an ELA educator, she highlights useful tools, instructional techniques, assessments, and SEL strategies.
Sharing Your Education Expertise with the World helps educators contribute their professional know-how to the larger education community. NBCT Rita Platt reports it is packed with great tips and resources for educators to widen spheres of influence and accelerate careers.
Nonfiction Texts / Wide Open Learning
by Megan Kelly · Published 12/18/2018 · Last modified 11/21/2019
Students getting a bit bored with your classroom library? The return from winter break is a perfect time for a “refresh,” says teacher Megan Kelly. She stretches her dollars by purchasing nonfiction books with broad appeal. Here are a few of her cross-content favorites.
Assessing Reading / Create Compose Connect
by Jeremy Hyler · Published 12/04/2018 · Last modified 11/27/2019
We want to help our students discover the joys of reading, writes 7th grade ELA teacher Jeremy Hyler. We also need to track their progress as readers. Check out some ways that Hyler assesses reading without committing “readicide,” using book websites, trailers and more.
Make the most of those minutes of fragmented class time that testing schedules, assemblies and pre-holiday half-days can create. Megan Kelly shares some of her own cross-curricular ideas to promote fun and active learning whether you have five minutes or five hours to fill.
When it comes giving students feedback, our approach can be formal or informal, low-tech or high-tech, writes teacher educator Curtis Chandler. The important thing is that we are constantly observing and offering guidance. As always, Curtis shares lots of practical tips.
You will find 100 teacher and student friendly mentor texts in Linda Rief’s The Quickwrite Handbook. Sourced from students, teachers, and authors as well as herself, the texts come with suggestions to get students thinking and writing, says consultant Anne Anderson.
Kids love visual texts such as art and photographs, but as with written texts, they often don’t know where to begin when asked to look at the works critically. Author and NBCT Marilyn Pryle finds that if given specific doorways, her students have much richer discussions.
There is no perfect method for shared decision-making among principals, teachers, staff and families, but it’s most successful when involvement is authentic, time is adequate, and agreed-upon norms are in place. Authors Ron Williamson and Barb Blackburn share strategies.
Whatever you know, sharing it outside school walls can inform policymakers, journalists, the public, other teachers, researchers, and professors – who can use your classroom discoveries to better serve students. Educator and writer Jenny Grant Rankin shows how.
