It’s April and English teachers and media specialists across the country are celebrating National Poetry Month with their students. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are all bubbling over with ideas and resources, so to add to the mix, I’ve pulled together a list of my favorite activities from years past. It doesn’t come with pictures, anchor […]
Years ago, in the early days of online gradebooks, I taught many students who took a learning strategies class as an elective. In that elective, they learned study skills and had time to complete assignments for other classes. The teacher required her students to complete weekly progress reports for the rest of their classes. The […]
It’s January, albeit the end of January. Most people (whether they’ll admit it or not) thought about changing and improving with the new year. It’s a natural inclination–probably spurred on by targeted advertising and social media. Change–specifically positive change–is necessary for growth or progress. I’ve always appreciated that as teachers we have plenty of opportunities […]
As we continue to shift to blended/distance learning, many of us have discovered how easy it is to take the worksheets we created in Word (designed for the copy machine) and upload them into Google Docs to assign them digitally to our students. That’s the easy part. What’s not so easy is the review/grading. Students […]
Whether we’re going back to school in person or virtually or some combination of the two, I think we can all agree that our job from the start is two-fold: not only do we need to teach our content, but we need to teach our students to use the technology. A few years ago, I […]
We need to help our students dig deeper into the text. We want them to understand–to make connections, to be able to explain what they’ve read, to use this knowledge after they’ve left our classrooms.
How many of us have stacks upon stacks on our desks and almost every other flat surface in the classroom? Use this system to get the papers under control so you can get things done.
These five easy-to-manage strategies will help your students process their understanding and show them (and you) what they do and don’t know.
Approaching rubrics as an instructional tool (as opposed to an evaluation technique) makes them much more powerful. To maximize the value, we need to simplify the tool.
The most common request I have received this year as a literacy coach is to cover a teacher’s class. Just kidding. That’s the second-most common request. Seriously, the practice that most of the teachers at my school seek my help with is questioning–specifically, how to write questions for the informational text they are using […]
Julie Conlon 