Best Practices & Interventions

If your experience with graphic organizers has been less than enchanting, stick around. This post has simple, specific suggestions for modeling with graphic organizers to increase learning! Picture this: You…

Looking to improve student-led discussions? While these conversations may be packed with some of the most powerful skills we can teach students, they certainly pose plenty of challenges. Consider, for…

Searching for engaging ways to build students’ background knowledge? Perhaps you need an activity to help students prepare to read a complex text, to write an essay, or to engage…

You’ve just asked one of the most thought-provoking questions of your teaching career, and you look out upon a sea of faces with anticipation. Fully expecting students to exude wonder…

What is meaningful homework? In middle and high school, stereotypical visions of students weighed down by heavy backpacks and up all hours of the night completing packets and studying for…

So you want students to do something…to show thinking…to process learning…and to communicate information. But, maybe you’re tired of recycling the same approaches and just need something refreshing. Enter sketchnotes.…

Inside: Students need to learn how to take charge of their learning. This involves developing independence and metacognition…along with some focused classroom norms that give students a voice. I taught…

Inside: There’s no secret ingredient to building a virtual classroom community. Every teacher will find approaches that work best for his or her own personality and teaching style. Hopefully, these…

It’s frustrating when we have what feels like hundreds of standards to teach and little time to do it in. How do you fit it all in? Everyone wants to…

It’s the end of the school year, and you’re tired. Not to worry! This post will save you time. Use these student reflection questions to spark critical thinking about learning…