While there are times when consensus makes sense, collaborative experiences are often most beneficial when they center on open-ended questions that invite students’ thinking. Teaching coach Gravity Goldberg shares ways to encourage exploration and creative expression in groups.
Teacher and coach Mona Iehl loves ending the school year with a choice-driven math fact fluency challenge. Students solidify their fluency before the next grade while also engaging in a fun initiative. Discover her simple 4-step process and check out the resources she shares.
When students learn to identify and name the ideas and emotions in poetry and share their own emotions through writing poems, they better understand their feelings and build empathy and understanding for others. Teacher leader Kasey Short shares methods and lots of poems.
Ramp up poetry positivity with the Peel the Fruit activity from Project Zero. Throughout the year NBCT Kathie Palmieri helps her fifth graders uncover layers of poetry understanding and then invites them to write their own. Their current favorite: the Intimate Object Poem.
Scholastic’s Dwaine Millard explores how community libraries can both offer all young people opportunities to improve their access to resources and technology and provide face-to-face settings where they can form positive social norms outside the boundaries of social media.
What would it be like to spend time together with colleagues on a regular basis to learn and improve our teaching skills? To investigate that question, Anne Jolly embarked on a year-long, onsite action research project to design and test a middle school teacher collaboration process.
As the world becomes increasingly digital, teachers want their STEM students to be comfortable using technology and digital tools skillfully and with purpose. STEM curriculum expert Anne Jolly identifies five specific STEM skill sets and relates them to dozens of current apps.
In Jay Wamsted’s 8th grade math class he chooses to go right for the conversation on race and culture when the opportunity arises. “After all, why not try to know each other a little better?” Learning happens, he says, when students and teacher can be authentic with each other.
Despite misgivings about plagiarism, many educators are excited about the promise of ChatGPT to help students research content-area topics for papers and projects. MiddleWeb’s John Norton shares his “conversation” with the new ChatGPT-4 while researching some family history.
“Ultimately book talk videos recorded by peers are beneficial if we want to inspire middle grades reluctant readers. They need to witness peers having fun with books. It nurtures the idea that reading is worth a try.” School librarian Kristen Day shares how her “EGGs” are doing it.
