The film Mean Girls is a lesson for anybody teaching, living with, or raising teenage girls. The line between being “popular” and being “Plastic,” as the four main characters are satirized, is no doubt a fine one. Without some adult intervention, it can become an everlasting gobstopper that chokes out the functioning of the classroom. Certainly, […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
10 Ways To Help Students Develop a Growth Mindset
Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has done numerous studies on how mindset affects achievement in children. The results showed that those with a fixed mindset perform more poorly than those with a growth mindset. However, not all students know how to change their mindset or even that intelligence is not a fixed thing that they […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum, Literacy
How to Create Reader Response Prompts
The response to my posts about using Response Notebooks rather than Reading Logs has been wonderful! The most common question I get is how to create quality reader response prompts for students to respond to after they do their individual reading. I’m pretty confident that my students think the prompts I give them are random; although, maybe […]
Posted inProfessional Development
The Reality Conundrum: What We Know Works vs. What We are Required To Do
The reality is this: what we know works and what we are required to do as teachers often don’t align. The conundrum is how to choose. We want to choose what we know is best for our students 100% of the time. Sadly, our institutional inertia and regulation and testing means that too often isn’t possible. […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
What Will it Take for White Teachers to #TalkAboutTrayvon?
Image from Flckr user @dignidadrebelde I received an e-mail today from Showing Up for Racial Justice reminding me that today is the 5th anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death. It is hard to believe five years have passed already. It is sobering to reflect on the growth of the Movement for Black Lives alongside the growing […]
Posted inTeacher Leaders
Using your Mission Statement to Establish Classroom Routines
We all know that the best way to manage the classroom is to create a positive, structured environment. That’s an adorable concept — but it is downright difficult to figure out what the heck that positive, structured environment ought to constitute. We learn a handful of suggestions in Teacher School; but in practice, these suggestions […]
Posted inTeacher Leaders
The Age Of Entitlement
When I first started teaching years ago I was gifted with classes that had almost 100% parent involvement. If I needed items for activities, my parents signed up. If we had classroom parties parents not only volunteered to organize them, but they also showed up to help. Over the years, this participation slowly declined. Parents were […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
Transgender Student Rights are Human Rights
Late Wednesday night, February 22, 2017, around 9pm EST, the Trump Administration released its new directive that rescinded the federal protections for transgender students in public schools and universities. Policy until this point, passed in the Obama administration, directed there be protection for all students equally, to ensure they had access to the bathrooms, locker […]