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 […]
High School
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 inEducational Apps, High School, Instruction & Curriculum, Literacy, Series, Technology
Adventures in Going Paperless: Step Two, Navigating Digital Feedback
After realizing my endless stacks of grading were threatening to swallow my sanity, I took the leap into embracing technology. However, what I found initially was that while stacks were fewer and my desk cleaner, my anxiety levels were not lower. In my quest for a new organizational system, I moved to using Turnitin.com for […]
Posted inGoing Paperless, High School, Instruction & Curriculum, Literacy, Series, Technology
Adventures in Going Paperless: Step One, Taking the Leap
urnA few years ago, my best teacher friend and I decided the entire population of the world could be dived into two kinds of people: spreadsheet people and stack people. Spreadsheet people sort and file. They label and color-code. Their organizational world is akin to the beloved spreadsheet after which they are named and on […]
Posted inHigh School, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies, Social Studies
Presenting Missing Histories
How do educators balance teaching in an area of expertise while knowing that what they know might not be enough? Media scrutiny and traditional practice of being the “sage on stage” for determining necessary content coverage for standardized tests thwarts the better practice of modeling inquiry and discovery. Teachers worried about the uniformity of content focus more […]
Posted inHigh School, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies, Literacy, Uncategorized
Close and Critical Reading: So What?
This is the final post in the Close and Critical Reading (CCR) Series. If you want to catch up: The first post defines what CCR is and why all teachers should be using it to instruct their students in reading. The second post discusses the importance of teaching summary. The third post examines why it is important […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, High School, Social Justice
The Toxic Rewards that Perpetuate our Dropout Rates
Last June, radio station WBEZ in Chicago discovered that Chicago Public Schools had been misrepresenting the number of high school dropouts. The investigation conducted by WBEZ discovered that over 2000 students were counted as “transferred” students when they’d actually dropped out. The story might have been local, but the issue is not. [bctt tweet=”Around the […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, High School, Opinion
The Perils of the United States of Smug
I make my living by teaching politics to high school seniors and college students. I am not a “read-the-textbook” kind of teacher. I want my students to watch the news. I want them to read political biographies. I want them to watch the complete seven seasons of The West Wing. Of course, few of them […]