Kevin Hodgson joins two middle level colleagues to share a cross-school collaboration supported by the National Writing Project that engaged teachers in investigating how to use writing strategies and inquiry learning with students in all content areas.
Co-Teaching Teams / Two Teachers in the Room
by Elizabeth Stein · Published 06/07/2015 · Last modified 12/13/2019
The essence of co-teaching consists of collaboration, communication, and compassion, says coach Elizabeth Stein. When any co-teaching pair makes these three ideals their everyday targets for teaching and learning together, they’ll have a successful partnership.
Seventh grade teacher Kami Spampinato uses four kid-savvy strategies to get her students to “buy in” to reading complex texts. In this post, former MS educator Anne Vilen of Expeditionary Learning summarizes each technique and shares supporting EL videos.
Co-teaching Models / Two Teachers in the Room
by Elizabeth Stein · Published 04/27/2015 · Last modified 12/02/2019
Collaborating teachers share the energy of co-teaching models: alternative, parallel, station, and team teaching. With the summer countdown underway, it’s a perfect time to reinvigorate your teaching by taking those models to class, says Elizabeth Stein.
Each chapter of Stop Leading Like It’s Yesterday gives an example of “yesterday’s way of thinking” and offers a new strategy for pursuing change, assessing success, and having critical conversations. MS administrator Tamekia McCauley plans to try several.
The new edition of A School Leader’s Guide to Excellence offers essential ideas for collaborating with all school stakeholders. Reviewer Tamekia McCauley says the authors provide extensive implementation guidance for their 9 topics, from Planning to Culture.
Writing Pathways: Performance Assessments and Learning Progressions can help K-8 educators at the grade, school and district levels develop effective collaborative writing programs, says reviewer Linda Biondi. Teachers will find extensive resources to build student ownership of writing.
With Common Core discussions as a sturdy frame, Heather Wolpert-Gawron provides solid commentary about how writing and literacy relate to all curriculum areas, says reviewer Kathleen Pham. Central to the sample lessons: project based learning.
Book Reviews / Common Core State Standards
by MiddleWeb · Published 09/03/2014 · Last modified 11/18/2019
“Common Core in the Content Areas” not only makes a convincing case that content-area teachers can be “literacy teachers” when it serves their purposes, says reviewer Sarah Goodis-Orenstein, it also provides “a bunch of teaching and planning tools” and collaborative learning tasks.
In their book Engaged, Connected, Empowered, Ben Curran and Neil Wetherbee examine five major shifts needed in education to provide students with 21st century skills. Reviewer Laura Von Staden found their work easy to follow with lots teachers can use right away.
