Pi Day comes once a year on March 14. It is a special day for a few reasons. The day itself can be written as the abbreviation for the number pi: 3.14. It also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday. I used to love pi day with my students because it gave me a day […]
Instructional Strategies
Posted inFrom the Front Lines, Instructional Strategies, Opinion
The Counter-Productivity of the Testing Mentality
The other day, I came to team planning with some really great exploration activities and math tasks for students to use to deepen their understanding of the concepts we were learning in class. As the person who writes the formal lesson plans for our department and a graduate student, I take my job seriously, and […]
Posted inClassroom Management, Featured, Instructional Strategies
Teaching Happiness Habits in the Classroom
By Guest Writer Michelle Wood I guess I consider myself a life coach, maybe, but I don’t know if that really captures what I do. (Does any title really capture all that we do?) I am a high school English teacher, a secondary new teacher mentor for my district, a health and wellness coach for […]
Posted inFeatured, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies
Happiness Habits in the Classroom
By guest writer Michelle Wood I consider myself a development coach, maybe, but I don’t know if that really captures what I do. (Does any title really capture all that we do?) I am a high school English teacher, a secondary new teacher mentor for my district, a health and wellness coach for women, […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies
Stop Grading Everything! On Grading What Matters
What should teachers include in their grade book? Coming from several school cultures where there is a category for everything and almost everything is graded, I notice a recurring theme. Students who typically do well continue to do so, but the students who struggle rarely find success. The fact that homework, classwork, quizzes, and tests […]
Posted inFeatured, High School, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies
Advantages of Asynchronous Learning
The traditional model of classroom learning usually revolves around whole-class pacing. Asynchronous learning means students learn at their own individual pace – often in a learning for mastery model. In traditional classrooms, assignments are all due on the same day for all students, units are planned to last a set amount of days or weeks, […]
Posted inFeatured, Instruction & Curriculum, Instructional Strategies, Mathematics
Decomposing Fractions: An Alternative for Converting Improper Fractions to Mixed Numbers
I, like many elementary teachers across the nation, have found myself teaching math concepts to 4th and 5th-grade students that were once taught to middle school students. Truth be told, when I first began teaching these skills I must admit I was very skeptical about teaching multiplying fractions and whole numbers to 4th and 5th […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Instructional Strategies, Literacy
30 Picture Books for Black History Month
First, let’s get something obvious out of the way. Black history is American history. It shouldn’t be relegated to one month out of the year. It should be taught every day. That said, that’s just not happening in K-12 classrooms today. So until that happens, I feel Black History Month is not only worth celebrating, […]