It always feels good when we ask a question and we get a correct answer in response. It feels good when our students do well. But sometimes their “success” fools us. We might think of correct answers as an example of learning. But along the
A few weeks ago I published a blog post (found here) lamenting reasons why teacher evaluation must change. The issue is compelling. BUT - nobody wants to only hear about what is wrong with something. In our district, we refer to this behavior as “admiring the
Teachers encounter many challenging responsibilities in their role: Learn and understand your state or provincial standards. Create a classroom that encourages reasoning and sense making. Teach each and every study in an equitable learning environment. Sift through the many different research based methodologies to learn
What IS Teacher Clarity? Simply put, teacher clarity means an educator has absolute clarity about what students are to learn, know, and be able to do for an upcoming instructional focus before they plan any instruction and assessments. The Clarity Problem Today there’s a lot of fuzziness around
In an era of relentless educational change, it is somewhat counter-cultural, I suspect, to write a book with the title of Reduce Change to Increase Improvement. My purpose in doing so, is to disrupt the assumption that change is always desirable, and to challenge educational leaders
I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to review Ana Homayoun’s new book, Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World (August 2017). I am very much in this space as I work at a high school of
This is an excerpt from Edutopia blogger, Dr. Monica Burns’ book #FormativeTech: Meaningful, Sustainable, and Scalable Formative Assessment with Technology (Corwin, 2017). As educators, we know students need opportunities to apply what they’ve learned in meaningful, authentic ways. When long-term projects are designed with this goal
Analogies require us to identify similarities between two or more items that may appear very different on the surface. Let’s look at two examples. Consider the following two analogies from Miller Analogies Practice Test (www.majortests.com): ____________ is to PLANETARY ORBITS as RATIOS are to BAKING. GEOMETRY
Imagine being a child moving through a K-12 educational system. In kindergarten, the teacher reads a silly, fun story aloud as the class listens intently. With prompting and support, the teacher asks students to identify the characters in the story. The students cheerfully tell the
How to talk the talk of your comprehension process so all students go Aha! I’m the think aloud queen. My eight-year-old daughter considers me nerdy for being so invested in teaching teachers about this one strategy, but some day she’ll see the cool factor. Well, maybe.