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…
Writing Lesson Goals and Objectives
Writing lesson plans is one of the most important skills a teacher needs to posses; in this series of articles, we will explore the process of writing lessons plans and how to unify them into a cohesive unit plan. We…