Hamilton in the Classroom Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard of the Broadway musical Hamilton, the hip-hop and rap production of the life of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, written by an award-winning musical playwright, composer, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda. Many of your students know the play well. In fact, […]
Responsive Classroom
Posted inCommon Core
3 Steps to Helping Students Develop College-Ready Writing Skills
Teachers are forever reminding their students that what’s going on in their classrooms will be ‘important to know in high school and college’ – but how many students actually believe them? I remember one student who replied to me when I said that: “Yeah, that’s what they say every year. And it’s never really true […]
Posted inHigh School
When Students Provide Perspective
Sometimes, I feel like I need a little perspective. Some days, I come home from work exhausted. Especially this week, the week before Thanksgiving Break. This is not something that is unique to me. All week, I have seen posts on social media from other teachers that are feeling the same way. With daylight savings […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
5 Strategies to Help Shy Students Succeed in Classroom Discussions
In my early years of teaching, I spent much of my time and energy focused on classroom management. Included in this was teaching students how to have a productive classroom discussion. I would plan mini-lessons about appropriate interjections, how to respond to someone who disagrees with your viewpoint (without being aggressively loud and using profanity), […]
Posted inFrom the Front Lines
Teachers Talk about RTI: The Educator’s Room Survey Results
RTI – Response to Intervention – has made its way to the top of the list of most commonly used education acronyms. Â Since changes to policy language in the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), the Response to Intervention framework has emerged as the favored way to identify students with learning disabilities. Â After a decade […]
Posted inBack to School
Making Sense of Special Education Paperwork: 3 Systems That Save Me Each and Every Time
I took a new position this year, one where the teaching I’ve been doing is the same, but the paperwork is not, I am a special education teacher in a resource room for kindergarten through third grade. For those of you are new to the special education area (like me) and are literally wallowing in […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher
A How To List For Flexible Classroom Seating
I don’t know why it took me so long to jump into flexible classroom seating. After 27 years of dodging clunky desks, tripping over backpacks and watching kids fidget uncomfortably in their hard plastic seats, I had had enough. I’ve had classes as large as 38, and it just was too hard to fit that […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Social Emotional Learning: Can It Help Our Most Vulnerable Students?
Imagine you have a student who every time they get upset they decide to engage in some negative behavior that totally disrupts your class? Whether the behavior is yelling or banging their head on the desk, there’s an obvious need for a different approach to working with students who come to school with a myriad […]