Summer is upon us and we hope you’ll soon be able to settle in with a stack of books you’ve been looking forward to reading. Some fiction perhaps. And then a couple of books to grow on. Here are a dozen we’ve selected from among our MiddleWeb reviews.
The Co-Teaching Relationship / Two Teachers in the Room
by Elizabeth Stein · Published 06/01/2014 · Last modified 12/14/2019
Our Two Teachers in the Room blogger shares her expertise for an upcoming online course. How can teachers create and maintain a successful co-teaching relationship? Elizabeth Stein answers questions from learning consultant Barbara Flanagan.
It’s hard to put down Readers Front & Center: Helping All Students Engage with Complex Texts, says our reviewer. Dorothy Barnhouse shows teachers how to focus on the reader, not the text, by using conferencing, questioning & other student-centered strategies.
Book Reviews / Vocabulary Instruction
by MiddleWeb · Published 06/01/2014 · Last modified 12/05/2019
While introducing vocabulary takes only a few minutes, true comprehension requires time. What’s a teacher to do? Reviewer Beth Morrow suggests picking up a copy of Marilee Sprenger’s Vocab Rehab for a succinct guide to research based activities.
The Common Core standards expect students to read increasingly challenging texts across the curriculum. Barbara Blackburn, author of Rigor in Your Classroom, highlights key factors associated with text complexity that teachers need to consider.
Social Media / Two Teachers in the Room
by Elizabeth Stein · Published 05/18/2014 · Last modified 12/03/2019
Elizabeth Stein constantly searches for professional development opportunities to strengthen co-teaching. Her district offers excellent PD, and she values virtual colleagues she’s found online. Lately her favorite PD comes with her own hashtag: #coteachat.
When sixth grade ELA teacher Kevin Hodgson’s students were asked to help pilot new paper circuitry learning tools developed at the MIT Media Lab, they chose to illuminate haiku poems about light. The technology draws on the work of Jie Qi, a mechanical engineer and MIT doctoral student known for her work with electrified paper.
Book Reviews / Personal Learning Networks
by MiddleWeb · Published 05/16/2014 · Last modified 05/19/2014
Organized and user friendly, Professional Learning in the Digital Age by Kristen Swanson provides educator cases, face-to-face protocols, research snippets and to-do lists to help teachers move through the process of developing their PLN, says reviewer Nicole Miller.
Future of History / Teaching strategies
by Aaron Brock · Published 05/11/2014 · Last modified 11/12/2019
While inner-city history teacher Aaron Brock agrees that lecture has been chronically abused in the middle grades, he uses short flexible lectures and image-heavy slides to help prepare students for deeper learning in his diverse classroom.
The topic of dictionaries came up in assorted conversations in the past few weeks, reminding Kevin Hodgson both of the power of those esteemed books of words as symbols of thought and scholarship, and the ways in which technology is completely altering the ease and means of how we find information when we need it.
