While it is important to gain the attention of students through activities that create opportunities for learning, sometimes lectures are necessary to help students connect prior knowledge to what they need to learn, and the New American Lecture is designed to teach students in a way that provides them with opportunities to interact with the […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Skills for Survival in Dystopia Part 2: Media Literacy
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, it has become increasingly clear that we are entering an abnormal era of American history. The xenophobia, religious intolerance, and white supremacy, aren’t new to life in America. But, Donald Trump’s presidency has made many of us feel that the “moral arc of the universe” is bending away from […]
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NCTE and ALAN Conference Highlights
I spent the weekend before Thanksgiving in Atlanta, Georgia at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the NCTE (ALAN) conferences. As a first-timer, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I have been to local and state-level teacher conferences before as well as national blogging […]
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On Modifications: Should All Students Climb the Mountain the Same Way?
As a former special education teacher, I remember hearing all of the time about how students needed to all do the same thing in the classroom because, at the end of the year, they would all take the same test. Despite the intellectual ability of the student, many teachers still argue that all students should […]
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What Do You Do With the Highly Advanced Reader?
As a teacher of gifted students, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Most students demonstrate asynchronous development. Others are bright but underachieving. Still, other students are not truly gifted, but are bright “teacher pleasers,” with the sort of behaviors that make teachers lives easier. What I did not expect was to find three students in […]
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Teaching Skills for Survival in Dystopia
Skill #1: Radical Imagination Welcome to Dystopia Last week I presented an argument. We should teach kids to value diversity and to speak up against bias, hate, and bullying. I thought it was a pretty innocuous idea. But by leading my post with a list of factual statements and actions taken by President-elect Donald Trump […]
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Who Will Care for the Teachers: A Podcast on Teacher Depression
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18% of the population. During this episode, Franchesca Warren breaks tradition and talks with not one but four fellow teachers who suffer from […]
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Top Ten Reasons to Feel Gratitude as an Educator
I did not start out wanting to teach. In fact, I recall sitting in a classroom with kids that needed help because the teacher quite obviously put me with them for that reason and thinking, “Oh my God! I will never become a teacher.” I had no patience for the kids who seemed not to care […]