Are you frustrated and worn out at the end of the day? Do you feel like you give everything you have and the children just don’t appreciate it? Does the next break from school look too far away for comfort? My mother taught for a total of fifty years, and, in those years, she speaks […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
The Echo of a Student’s Voice Pt. 2
I taught an 8th-grade writing class my first year of teaching. The standards allowed for 3 essays: one argumentative, one informative essay, and one narrative. A narrative essay was a strange name for a short story to me. I didn’t entirely understand the difference until I investigated the goals of the narrative essay standard. The […]
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Want the Best Instructional Feedback? Ask Your Students.
There came a time in my teaching career where I had to ask myself whose opinion about my instruction matters more: the administrator who comes to my classroom maybe four times per year or the students with me for 180+ days? When I started implementing the instructional feedback from my students, my instruction and student […]
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Reassessing How We Test: A Pandemic Proof Call for Action
“Will this test even count?” One of my students unmuted briefly on Zoom to ask about the impending end-of-year state assessments. A normally reticent child who preferred clicking his responses away in the chatbox, spoke up confidently now as if on behalf of the whole class. I stammered my way through a response that sounded […]
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Why I Microwaved My Strawberries: An Analogy for this Entire School Year
Setting the Stage It’s Tuesday and I’ve just closed my classroom door so I can eat my lunch. I have pulled apart students in two separate fights already in the first part of the morning and I’ve heard rumors of others happening through the building. My first-period lesson didn’t happen because the technology wasn’t working. […]
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Innovation in the Classroom: Are We Valuing the Teachers That Can Make It Happen?
Christy Sutton is an educator with over fifteen years of classroom experience. She holds a B.A. in Communication Disorders and Deaf Education and a M.A. in Instructional Design. Christy is passionate about human-centered approaches to education, individualized learning environments, and teacher retention. She is currently an intervention teacher for middle and high school students. She […]
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The Trauma of Being a Black Educator
There is so much more to being a teacher than the content you teach, especially when you are a Black teacher. My experiences as a Black teacher are heightened even more and undoubtedly shared by many fellow Black educators. When asserting one’s voice is seen as angry, when a desire to be alone is seen […]
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The High Costs of Ignoring Health in Schools
Shane Trotter is the author of Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement. As a writer, social studies teacher, and High-School Strength and Conditioning Coordinator, he has been challenging youth development norms for over a decade. He has been published by websites with millions of readers, such […]