Building Classroom Data: Tying Lessons to Standards
Education is being pushed to become and more data driven, instead of a teacher’s hunch that something needs to be changed it needs to be data that makes the decisions now. One of the most important pieces of data a teacher can use is achievement data.
Forums Drive Class Questioning
Last year in my classroom I went back to using online forums as a way to prime my students’ about a given topic that we would be talking about in class. Forums can be a great tool to get students…
Why Join Professional Organizations
Professional organizations are a great way to build connections with others professionals in your industry. In many professions isolation tends to become the norm as people are tied to their desk and working on multiple projects at the same time….
Why I Moved To Standards Based Grading
I have always felt that educational assessment, needed to reflect skills and abilities not simply just facts and figures that could be memorized and regurgitated back. This isn’t deep and meaningful learning, it is simply recalling memorized information that students…
Building Connections In and Out Of School
Historically teachers have been very isolated in their profession, both from the outside community and from each other, each teacher having the mindset that they are the master of their domain and knowing best what each student should learn. We…
Learning Skills vs Tools
In my school district we have converted over to the google tools and applications for about a year now and still many people, myself included have made some push back against using these tools for classroom work since they are…
Building a Brand
Most high school education programs are at their core the same thing from school to school and subject to subject. So how do you make your program standout so that it is recognizable to students, parents and colleagues? The best…
Tech Etiquette: Part 1 – File Organization
In my class we work with a multitude of files of various types. One of the biggest problems my students run into is that they save a file and have no ideas what they named it or where they put…
Social Contracts as a Tool to Manage Behavior – Part 2
In the first part of this article, social contracts were presented as a method to teach student to manage their own behavior in class and to minimize classroom disruption throughout the course of a school day. There are a variety…
Social Contracts as a Tool to Manage Behavior – Part 1
Social Contracts conceptually are not a new idea they have been around for many years in different forms and names: behavioral agreements and behavioral contracts to name a few. These tools were originally developed by psychologists to help troubled students…