Education Articles for Teachers & Educators

Part 1: Turning the Summer SLIDE into a Launchpad for Learning. Is the summer slide making your students' return to school this year a bit bumpy? If you’ve noticed that your students are struggling as they come back from summer break, you’re not alone! The "summer slide" can significantly impact their skills and motivation. This article, part 1, offers insights into how summer break affects student learning to help you explore ways to fill learning gaps and have a successful start to this school year!

Do you want to transform your admit and exit tickets from routine to reflective ones? From reframing prompts to fostering self-assessment, discover some actionable strategies for cultivating a culture of reflection through admit and exit tickets.

Do your Mondays look just like your Wednesdays? Are you looking for a strategy to get you and your students out of the everyday slump? Welcome to the world of energy breaks—a powerful tool that can breathe new life into your daily classroom routine! In this article, we'll explore how incorporating energy breaks into your daily classroom routine reinvigorate student focus, foster collaboration, and create an atmosphere where learning thrives, and everyone (including you) is energized!

Merry Techmas! Tis the season to bring some AI into your classroom! Let's explore how it can be the star on your teaching tree and the gingerbread icing on your lesson plans! In this festive blog post, we're going to explore the resources that will help you leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a winter wonderland of learning for your pre-K-12 students. From making lessons more inclusive for learners with differences to optimizing grading and enhancing student and parent engagement, we've got the resource suggestions you need to jingle all the way!

As a brand new teacher, you’re probably excited about finally putting everything you have learned into practice. You can’t wait to get to know your new students, but you’re probably also a bit nervous about the unknown. Am I going to enjoy teaching? Will my students like me? Will I be a good teacher? You likely hope that you are well-prepared for your teaching journey and want to be sure that you start the year off right. This article will provide you with some insights into what you can consider as you embark on your new teaching journey to ensure that you become an effective teacher.

Peer tutoring is an effective flexible grouping strategy that can be a terrific way to improve your instructional effectiveness, while also improving the sense of community, confidence, and leadership skills of your students. It is important to establish processes, provide support, and plan when choosing your tutor and tutee and it is important to consider several factors when deciding to use this strategy in your classroom. This blog post will provide you with an essential overview of several critical factors, concepts, and strategies to consider when considering peer tutoring for your students.

Science is different in other content areas in that the foundation of its existence relies on asking questions about the world around us, forming and testing a hypothesis, and analyzing the results. It’s only natural that a science classroom would mirror the essence of this field. While direct instruction and practice-based learning have their place, the science classroom is where learning to discover is as important as the content itself. In this blog post, we’ll outline a specific process, the Scientific Investigation Framework, that will provide structure to discovery-based Lab work that will transform how students are introduced to new content and practice the necessary processes of a true scientist.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years (and especially in the past several months) in various industries, many in the education space are now wondering how this will affect the careers of K-12 teachers and educators. Many opinion articles have stated the potential for AI to replace teachers. However, we, as professional educators, could not disagree more! In this blog post, we will explore a few key reasons why teachers will not be replaced by AI technologies anytime soon.

Your students need a model for improving their work; with timely and specific feedback, it will be easier for them to work to improve in certain areas. Student feedback identifies particular areas of student performance and provides insight into their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, feedback should be a natural component of most assessment methods you provide in your classroom. This article will give you a brief set of steps to help you build timely and targeted student feedback.

Ideas and strategies to check for student understanding are plentiful. You may find that you’ll use several different methods within each classroom and choose methods specific to the task students complete. A large toolbox of strategies to pull from can help ensure you understand exactly what each student knows. When designed correctly, your methods to check for student understanding can also work to support students in self-analyzing their learning to train them to think critically about what they do and do not know. The 3-2-1 Strategy is a simple yet effective method you can introduce to your students to learn what they know and to help them analyze it for themselves.

In your classroom, you likely have identified specific problems impacting student behavior or performance that needs to be solved in a certain way. You might be utilizing a specific instructional method, assessment, classroom management strategy, or something else as part of your classroom routine to help address the issues you see. Or, you may begin utilizing something new in your classroom that can help make positive changes in your students. But, does it work? Is the selected approach the most effective for your students?

Icebreakers are activities that help students connect with one another in a new setting. It can help set the tone for a year of fun collaboration and allows students who may not have made many new connections to begin to feel comfortable with their classmates. In addition, combining movement with dialogue can help students mentally “branch out” to make new friendships within the classroom.