Providing students with opportunities to explore, wonder, and discover. Mini-Course Day As I began teaching a thoughtfully designed lesson on conductors and insulators, I was met with blank stares and compliant students, patiently waiting me out. If they weren’t such compliant young people, they might have said, “Really, is this necessary? Can we start learning
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Students develop as leaders and advocates for positive change. In 2012, I incorporated the Lead2Feed Student Leadership program into my classes because of its focus on leadership and service learning. In 2016, I decided to use Lead2Feed as the curriculum during our enrichment time to help encourage students’ active engagement in a program that helps
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Effective ways to enhance reading and writing experiences. Recently, I was teaching a language arts class in Logan, West Virginia. The objective of the lesson was to analyze the impact of tradition on human behavior using narrative text. Sounds really dull, doesn’t it? It could have been, had I not used engaging strategies to facilitate
Read More… from 20 Literacy Strategies for Engaging the Middle Level Brain
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Move the desks out of the way, pull up a piece of rug, and invent something using the engineering process and leftover parts. Just like anything else, the Internet provides a plethora of ideas to define and design “makerspaces.” Other names include fablabs, hackerspaces, and design labs. In our school, our students devise problems when
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As a family and consumer science teacher at the middle school level, the Lead2Feed Student Leadership Program lessons seem to blend seamlessly into my curriculum. Some of the major units of family and consumer science are interpersonal relationships, leadership, community connections, resource management, and global citizenship. The Lead2Feed lessons connect to each of these units on multiple
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Films can—and should—be more than time-killers in your classroom. We all know the stereotypical image of the teacher who, tired of direct instruction, dims the lights, turns on the DVD player, and sits quietly while students stare at the screen. The problem here is not that students are watching a film in class—it’s that the
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