As a college professor who also teaches high school students computer science in a summer program, dinner-table conversations in my home often sound like faculty meetings. My husband, an assistant principal and former classroom social studies teacher, and I regularly compare notes about what we are seeing in students as they move from middle school […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
What Other High-Stress Professions Know About Burnout That Teaching Ignores
In my first semester of graduate school for clinical mental health counseling, we spent an entire class talking about supervision. Not evaluation.Not observation checklists.Supervision. We talked about structured reflection, emotional containment, ethical limits, and the responsibility organizations have to protect people who do care-heavy work. We discussed what happens when professionals are exposed to distress […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
When Everyone Else is Scrolling: Why I’m Delaying Smartphones for My Daughters
I’ve spent a decade teaching high school English, and I can tell you exactly when a student got their first unrestricted smartphone. Not because they tell me, but because I watch it happen in real time. The attention span fragments, the anxiety spikes, and the ability to sit with difficult thoughts disappears. I’m also a […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
From Funding to Fidelity: What Districts Should Know as LIFT Implementation Begins
With the launch of LASO Cycle 4, Texas is ushering in the next evolution of its grant and allotment programs, investing over $500 million to strengthen schools across the state. “Learning Acceleration Support Opportunities (LASO) is a single, consolidated application that combines grants, allotments, and in-kind supports, bundled around a few key strategies to accelerate […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
What to Teach: Why character education is important
It’s difficult to imagine an educator who would not be emotionally affected and professionally engaged by this excerpt from a letter to educators published in Teacher and Child by Haim Ginott. “I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned […]
Posted inEducational Apps
Is gamifying education really a good idea?
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington D.C., and I can remember hoping and wishing that my teachers had something fun planned for class each day. That being said, I knew that that “something fun” was highly dependent on how my classmates and I performed in class. If we were focused and finished […]
Posted inHistory
National History Day: Using choice to teach History in the English classroom
How do we empower students to retain skills and content? This is an ongoing struggle that ranges across grade levels. As educators, we have all had the conversation with students, “You learned this last year….” Over the last several years, I have incorporated an in-depth project-based learning approach, National History Day, into my writing curriculum, […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
Holding your kids back: Retention isn’t the problem
The idea that holding students back when they haven’t met grade-level standards does more harm than good is a widely held belief in education circles. This phrase is often repeated as if it were an unquestionable scientific fact. But few anti-retention advocates seem to understand how the foundational studies were conducted, what the data could […]