Education Articles for Teachers & Educators

Are current events forcing you to move your regular classroom teaching online? Do you struggle to stay connected with your students without seeing them face-to-face each day? Read this article to learn key strategies you can implement right away to bring a sense of community to your online class.

Lights! Camera! Dying to inject tech into literature while getting the comprehension Action! you crave for your students? Just as in any film making process, when using movie preview projects to engage your class of readers, you have to keep your own audience in mind. In this article, we’ll review a must for ensuring you get the product quality you demand, and your (student) film crew gets the experience and understanding that makes any literature study project worthwhile.

While it can be argued that teaching is a highly rewarding profession, it can also be argued that teaching is a demanding career. Between time constraints, physical demands, testing pressure, and the emotional toll that teaching can take, its no wonder that many teachers face burnout and leave the profession. However, there are several actions teachers can take to alleviate this burnout.

Most educators have a general understanding of blended learning as an educational strategy that blends traditional teaching with technology. However, true blended learning is not as simple as using a laptop to research online or using an iPad to create a photo slideshow. Read on to learn how to implement blended learning in your classroom with fidelity.

Getting the most from peer reviews in your classroom? Stretch your investment through Growth Mindset in 4 steps—or use these free resources—to boost the benefit for you and your students.

How might some of your students benefit if they could mentally solve math problems quicker and with more confidence, all while clearly explaining their thinking and strategies? It all starts in the first ten minutes of your math lesson with a Number Talk! This article will show you how you can implement Number Talks with your students in as little as five steps, as well as provide example routines and problems that are ready to be used in your next math lesson.

When you want your students to engage in lively discussion, choosing the right format makes all the difference. Use Round Table Circles, a powerful tool that will keep your students engaged.

Grouping students during the practice phase of your lesson can have many benefits. Students often like to talk and interact with their peers, and this gives them an excellent opportunity to practice what they are learning. However, many questions can arise when it comes to grouping your students. How should you group them? How can you implement grouping quickly and effectively, so you aren’t wasting class time?

Every teacher struggles from time to time with the art of closing a lesson effectively. We all know the importance of wrapping up the lesson, linking it to prior knowledge, and building anticipation for the next lesson. Ideally, that daily wrap-up should include some quick from of assessment or check for understanding that you can use to inform your instruction for the next day. One quick and effective way to do just that is through the use of an exit ticket.

After reading this article, readers will understand the three critical steps of backwards design in lesson planning, as well as the rationale behind it. They will be able to work through those three steps in order to plan a lesson or series of lessons for any upcoming unit.

Many people often think that a formal assessment is a sufficient way to check their students’ understanding. While these assessments are certainly useful to determine your students’ level of content mastery at the end of a unit, checking for understanding is something that should happen regularly throughout a lesson.

If you are fortunate enough to work in a co-teaching situation, we encourage you to try station teaching and/or alternative teaching as instructional models. Station teaching is perfect for when you want to implement a variety of learning activities, and alternative teaching is an excellent method of differentiating instruction for two groups working at different academic levels.