I remember the days in the 1960’s and 70’s when Special Education was not even a word, and anyone that had disabilities was rarely seen or heard. I’m so thankful today that we have so many programs that help students with disabilities, but as state budgets get tighter, the push for more special support staff reduction […]
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Posted inFeatured, Teacher Burnout
Challenge Yourself Professionally; Avoid Teacher Burnout
The profession of teaching can sometimes be trapped by its own lore. When we started as new teachers, we all met the veterans who had been in their classrooms for 20 or 30 years, and they were held up as the examples to which we should aspire. We were all told that the goal was to get your […]
Posted inFeatured, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies
What Makes a Great Unit?
With so many skills and so many concepts, units are a necessity. We can become overwhelmed with the amount of material we have to cover in a short time. I have learned I only focus on one unit at a time. A unit is a set amount of skills or concepts tied to a literary […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Fine Arts, From the Front Lines, High School, Opinion, Social Justice
Why NYC Students Seeing 'Hamilton' Is a Big Deal
On October 27th, a joint collaboration of The Rockefeller Foundation, The Gilder Lehrman Foundation, producer Jeffrey Seller, creator (and star) Lin-Manuel Miranda, and New York City public schools announced that they will provide a means for more than 20,000 eleventh graders to not just watch Hamilton, the hottest, most ground-breaking musical in decades – but to actually go […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, From the Front Lines, High School, Literacy
Different Teachers, Different Pressures
There is a certain about of pressure that comes with being a high stakes teacher, okay, it is a ton of pressure. A high stakes teacher is a teacher whose class performance on a standardized test is directly tied to the School Performance Score. At a small school, this means there are only four or […]
Posted inFeatured, Teacher Burnout
Smothering Burnout: Tips for Teachers On the Edge of Teacher Burnout
I am in my twentieth year of teaching. I know I am doing what I was created to do. I know I am teaching where I need to be teaching. But after two decades of teaching, the ‘B’ word has begun to haunt me: I am burning out. My dad used to always say if […]
Posted inFeatured, Opinion
15 Things My Newborn Son Taught Me About Education
On November 1st at 11:05p, Jonah, my newborn son, entered the world, joining my wife and me. While I’ve taught nearly 1,500 students in my 10 years of education, I hadn’t learned as much from one until I had after staying home with my new found family. Here are a dozen things he’s taught my wife and me that […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Opinion, Principals' Corner, School Improvement, Uncategorized
Zero Tolerance For Zero Tolerance
As Russell J. Skiba points out in his research on zero-tolerance policies, it’s quite difficult to find the “moment” when our schools implemented zero-tolerance policies in our school, but we can trace the impact of them to the 1994 Free Schools Act as a time when districts were quick to suspend students for fear of […]