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Home » Education Articles » Lesson & Curriculum Planning
  • Effective Professional Development

What Makes Professional Development Effective? Research-Based Characteristics and the ESSA Definition

September 14, 2026|

Every fall, school and district leaders make decisions about how to spend professional development dollars. Some of that money comes from local budgets, and a large share comes from Title II, Part A, which arrives in two installments and must be spent on activities that meet the federal definition of professional development. You have many options for professional development, like conferences, workshops, in-person trainings, online trainings, coaching, and more. The difficult part for you, though, is determining which professional development activities will be the most effective for your teachers. This article gives you some ideas on what effective professional development means. In this article, you will first learn about the research on what effective professional development looks like, summarized in seven characteristics that you can use as a checklist. The second is the definition of professional development written into the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which determines whether an activity is an allowable use of federal funds. Understanding this in more detail will help you choose professional development that improves instruction and also withstands a compliance review.

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  • Jigsaw Strategies

Jigsaw Strategies: Using the Jigsaw Method for Cooperative Learning in Your Classroom

September 2, 2026|

Think about a lesson where every student in your class is responsible for one piece of the content, and no one will be able to understand the content fully unless they all work together and learn from each other. Consider one student group who have studied the causes of an event, another has studied the key figures responsible for the event, and a third has studied the consequences of that event. When these students regroup, each student becomes the source of information that they then share with their peers. To understand the entire concept for the lesson, every student has to teach one piece, and every student has to listen to the others. This is the foundation of a popular cooperative learning strategy in education: the jigsaw method. Jigsaw strategies break a topic into parts, make each student an expert in one part, and then rely on students to teach one another until the full concept comes together. But, in order for it to be actually effective and promote learning, you must consider a specific structure and planning process when implementing this into your classroom.

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  • School Field Trip Ideas

School Field Trip Ideas: Planning Trips That Reinforce What Your Students Are Learning

August 21, 2026|

Think back to your own childhood as a student in school. Do you recall going on any field trips? Maybe you toured an art museum and can still picture your favorite work. Perhaps you went to a zoo or aquarium and learned about an animal you never knew existed. Maybe you watched a play or a musical performance that sparked a lasting interest in the arts. Field trips give students the chance to experience things they might not otherwise encounter in their daily lives, and they can have a lasting impact on a child's education. Read More.

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  • Operant Conditioning in the Classroom

Skinner’s Theory of Operant Conditioning in the Classroom

August 12, 2026|

You have likely used, or seen, teachers transform and improve behaviors using a simple sticker chart as a rewards system. You might have also seen how a student’s behavior improves after you focus on providing consistent and specific praise. Positive and negative behaviors in your classroom don’t typically come out of nowhere, and much of what your students do is actually shaped by what happens before they do it and whether the behavior is followed by something like a reward, a consequence, or a specific action. One well-studied framework for understanding student behaviors comes from B.F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which describes how what comes after the behavior is what makes that behavior more or less likely to happen. In this article, you will learn about operant conditioning and why it can be beneficial to understand in your classroom.

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  • Instructional Teaching Strategies

Instructional Strategies and Teaching Strategies in Your Classroom

July 31, 2026|

Instructional strategies are research-based methods that teachers use to deliver content to students and improve their instructional practice. But it also goes further than that, because by combining classroom management strategies, assessment strategies, and other brain-based and memory-based strategies to support students, they all work together to improve the classroom and increase learning. This article serves as a resource to understand how strong instructional and other teaching strategies translate to student success in your classroom. (Read more)

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  • What is Rigor

What Is Rigor? Understanding Rigor Through Webb’s DOK

July 16, 2026|

As a teacher plans a reading unit for her upcoming class, she decides to increase the rigor of her planned lesson activities. Since the text she chose contains many unfamiliar words, students are tasked with reading a passage, listing the unfamiliar words, and defining them using their dictionaries. She decides that instead of requiring students to choose five words to define, she will require students to define ten words this time. (Read more)

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  • Behavioral Momentum

Using Behavioral Momentum to Improve Student Behaviors

July 1, 2026|

Think about this familiar scene. In a kindergarten classroom, it is time to clean up an art activity and move to the carpet for reading time. You give the instructions for cleaning up, and most of your class starts putting materials away. One student does not; instead, she stays at her table, continuing to color and play with her materials. When you ask her to put her materials away and join the group, she says no and turns away. You repeat the direction more firmly, then walk over to her and ask her to join the group. Many teachers in this situation might continue to restate the expectations and become frustrated if one student is not able to listen. Even when classroom norms and rules are well implemented, some children will not comply for various reasons. Instead of struggling with compliance, teachers can add another approach for those students who need additional help. Called behavioral momentum, a teacher instead asks students to do smaller, easier-to-complete tasks that lead up to the main, more challenging tasks. (Read more)

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  • Model Teaching - Geography Study

Building Geography Knowledge: Retrieval Practice of Countries, Regions, and Geographical Features

June 24, 2026|

Imagine a middle school teacher finishes a unit on East Asia. Students had been working on identifying and locating physical and geographic features on a map, like landforms, bodies of water, and urban centers, as well as identifying the location of countries around the world. In this unit, the teacher described the region’s monsoon climate, and students learned why its rivers support a denser population than in other areas. While students are engaged in the content throughout the unit and analyze a map of the region as they discuss its features, they have a hard time identifying geographic features on their own. For example, when the teacher projects a blank map onto the board and asks students to identify the Yellow Sea or label countries like China, Japan, and North and South Korea, many students are unable to do so, even though they discussed these areas in class extensively. (Read More)

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  • Think Pair Share Model

Think-Pair-Share- More Than a Discussion Starter

June 17, 2026|

We all know the Think-Pair-Share! It’s a common student collaboration strategy that is seemingly ubiquitous across classrooms. But it has been around long enough that many teachers will treat it as routine to incorporate into the classroom, rather than thinking more deeply about it as a true learning strategy. (read more)

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  • Think Pair Share Webinar

Webinar: Thinking Together: The Think-Pair-Share Model

June 16, 2026|

In this Model Teaching Spotlight webinar, you will explore Think-Pair-Share as a research-backed collaborative learning model and learn how to implement it effectively in any classroom. You will consider some elements that determine whether a collaboration activity produces strong learning, evaluate the kind of prompts you might build to promote higher-order thinking and peer discourse, and consider how you might use the think-pair-share collaborative structure to engage your students.

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