Viewing: Educational Policy
Making, Writing, & Leaving My Wheelhouse: How This Relates to ELD Students (UPDATED)
I first began blogging to reflect on what I was learning during my summer with the Writing Project. After each day, I returned home, head spinning, needing to simply process. Finally, my husband said, “Why don’t you try starting one
Celebrating the Refugees Already in Our Classrooms: Memories and Advice From a Student
In June 2001, a family of four escaped from the slaughter of Nepal and made their way across the world to safety. They arrived, not in boats dragged up on shore, but in the arms of families who helped them
The Invisible Strategies of Teaching: #whatpeopledontsee
hen you walk onto a middle school campus and even into the rooms themselves, it can look like chaos. After all, middle schoolers are wired to be active and wired to be loud. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t learning
Boy Talk at Recess: Pokemon, Light Sabers, and Things That Go Boom!
y most recent post for The Huffington Post just went live. It chronicles my embarrassment when my 9-year-old son chose his classroom’s parent-led art session to voice his recent interest in bloody talk. It also chronicles my son’s frustration at
DIY Project Based Learning for ELA and History
’m excited to announce that my new book, DIY Project Based Learning for ELA and History has arrived and is now available for purchase. The point of the book was to break down the process of PBL into day-by-day chunks
How to Host a Twitter Chat with your School Community
very year schools sit and brainstorm ways to communicate and engage its families. How will we reach out to parents? How will we gather information about their needs or give them a little insight in what we do as educators? A
The Full Interview with Dr. Spiros Michalakis
s part of my recent superhero PBL unit, I brought in Dr. Spiros Michalakis to talk to my students about research for their science-fiction based narratives. Spiros is a Quantum Physicist who consulted on the new Marvel movie, Ant-man. Sure,
Training Judges for a Speech Tournament: A Reflection on How Students (Even Adults) Learn
e just finished hosting our first quarter speech tournament on Friday night. Our league, to our knowledge, is one of the largest middle school leagues in the country, and the coaches meet frequently to ensure that our tournaments run as
What is the Purpose of School?: Understanding Purpose Helps with Student Motivation (updated)
start my school year with a little blog post about what students think school is all about. It begins a year-long conversation about purpose that I then refer to throughout the school year. “What is the purpose of the digital
Organizing Google Drive For Your New School Year
I have drunk the Google Drive Kool-Aid. I used it daily last year, and I am now a convert. However, as a result of my recent condition that I’m calling Googlenthusiasm, my inbox and Drive are now ready for a
Having Any Nightmares About the Start of School Yet?
I posted the following on Facebook earlier today and got such a fun response, I just had to put it out there in a bigger way: Had my first start-of-year-stress-dream last night. My collaborative tables had been replaced with
So You Think You Can Dance + Math = STEAM
I just wanted to share a quick classroom resource today that I stumbled on in my TiVO feed. I admit it, I’m a So You Think You Can Dance geek. It’s always been a great show in terms of modeling
Do You Remember the Moment When You First Learned “Grit?”
OK, so here’s my confession: I’m not so sure that grit can be taught. I know, however, from experience, that it can be learned. So I think it’s time we all had a frank conversation about the role of school
Can you trick a student into thinking critically? Or is it just a trick?
So my students are currently taking a publisher’s online pilot test. We are doing it for three reasons: 1. This gives the students practice for the SBAC online test. The format of these practice tests is meant to mimic that
Speech and Debate Secret Sauce: Building Community in Any Classroom
As I’ve recently written, I am the coach of a very successful and very large middle school speech & debate team. It’s a huge job to coach all of these kids, but it’s amazingly rewarding. It’s rewarding to know that
Let’s Talk About Speech, Baby: Speech & Debate and the Common Core
Besides being a Language Arts teacher, I am also a Speech and Debate coach. I haven’t written about it too much, not for any reason other than I spend a lot of time geeking out over curriculum design in teaching
What do Jeff Wilhelm and Ashton Kutcher Have in Common? : Teaching for Character
Earlier this December, I attended the UCI Writing Project annual conference. Every year, this conference douses a teacher in strategies to teach writing and literacy, and every year I come away with valuable methods and implementation goals. This year, the
Tips on Embedding Evidence: Writing with Numeracy
As we journey deeper into the world of Common Core, the need for factual evidence rather than emotional opinion becomes more and more vital. So that got me thinking in a more targeted way: as an ELA teacher, what are
Tween Brains, Part III: How to Work It Out In The Classroom
In part 1 and part 2 of my series on the tween brain, I covered why teachers need to become brain hobbiests and some key terms when learning about the brain. In this final post on the tween’s crazy cranium,
The Obsession with Self-Quantification and the Consequence in Education
I recently read a commentary in Time Magazine by Kathleen Parker called, Count Me Out. It was a fascinating little diatribe about our obsession with self-tracking and quantifying success. She was looking through the lens of folks who find ways
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