Teaching

Supporting EL Newcomer Students

This past year, the team at Lincoln Middle School faced a new, unexpected challenge. “We’re a district that never really had a big newcomer population,” said Ivona Wypych, the EL teacher at Lincoln Middle School in Park Ridge, Illinois. That changed when an influx of students, mostly from Ukraine, moved into their community. Their arrival

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Creating Spaces Where Students Thrive

New Research Highlights Perspectives from Self-Described Social Justice Educators In a recent issue of Middle School Journal, researchers Ebony Terrell Shockley and Valeisha Ellis investigated, through a series of interviews, the perspectives and pedagogical practices of teachers who self-identify as social justice educators. But what does that really mean, to be a social justice educator?

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A New Mindset: Assessment Strategies that Work

What if you were told that a weekly spiraled assessment was a vital part of preparing your students for the end-of-year summative assessment? When we, an eighth-grade math co-teaching team, started working together in 2017, we were not convinced. Now, six years later, we not only believe in weekly spiraled assessments (WSAs) and use them

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