Are we asking our students to take risks that we as adults aren’t willing to take? Structure is utilized in the middle school experience to build a safe learning environment for our students. Students are placed on teams where they take classes with the same peer group, increasing their comfort level in contributing to classroom
Ideas that energize your lessons and fuel students’ desire to learn The best compliment a teacher can ever receive from a student is when they look at you and say, “Class is over?” These three words let you know loud and clear that they were engaged, focused, and enjoying the lesson you have created. But
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We stood in the empty classroom. Lisa looked up at me. “I couldn’t understand what I read last night,” she said. I looked at her, speechless. The class was reading a novel, and I wondered why Lisa had been failing the daily quizzes. These were genuine “right-there” questions, designed only to see if the students
Read More… from Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop
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The benefits of using graphic novels in the social studies classroom The standards in current education reform movements stress the importance of strengthening students’ content-area literacy skills. This means that social studies teachers must draw on powerful texts. The problem is that many students enter our classrooms lacking an interest in reading. One type of
Read More… from Using Graphic Novels to Open the Gateway for Struggling Readers
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Four steps to build capacity for long-term innovation Innovation has become a widely-used term in education with a variety of interpretations. Generally, innovation implies novelty and inventiveness that leads to improvement and thus, is considered a positive contribution to society. But in education we must be careful not to equate innovations with research-based practices, proven
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One middle school gives students a personal send-off On the last day of school for the past six years, after hiking a small mountain near our school in Vermont, we gather in the shade of venerable maples for a final ceremony with the eighth grade class. After each eighth grade team member reflects briefly on
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Read More... from AMLE Celebrates Inaugural Schools of Distinction
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Read More... from Reimagining School – What should it look like and who is it for?
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