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Teaching for Civic Engagement: Vocabulary for Action
See Matt’s Video on Teaching Channel: Encouraging Students to Take Action
In order for students to engage in effective civic engagement, I fundamentally believe that they have to master the vocabulary to identify and analyze problems in our society, plan an action step, and reflect on their work. With this goal in
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Why Social Studies? It's "Self-Evident"!
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“High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it "the most irrelevant" of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. "Borr-r-ring" is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it,
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Teaching for Civic Engagement: Criteria for Effective Civic Engagement
See Matt’s Video on Teaching Channel: Encouraging Students to Take Action
Identifying and analyzing what makes for effective civic action is pretty murky business. One reason it's so challenging to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular movement, group, or action step is because definitions of effectiveness vary so much.
There are a number
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I Want to Get Better at... Learning through Video
Over the past few weeks, Teaching Channel has been offering up ideas for getting better at something this summer to prepare for the next school year. We’ve given you suggestions for learning about classroom organization, growth mindset, classroom management, and social emotional learning. This week, we’re offering you ideas for learning
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Tch DIY: Introducing the Choral Counting Number Routine
Seeing math routines through the lens of every grade level has been such an amazing experience. While I've remained fairly consistent in the types of routines filmed in the kindergarten, third, and fourth grade classrooms, I've introduced a new routine to this first grade collection called Choral Counting.
Choral Counting is
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I Want to Get Better at... Social Emotional Learning
Discover how you can create a safe, supportive learning environment and integrate SEL into your practice.
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Youth Mic: What Three Transgender Students Wish Their Teachers Knew
Research tells us that LGBTQ students continue to experience harassment and discrimination at school, and these climates negatively affect health and educational outcomes. However, the narratives mean more coming directly from the students themselves. Below are the responses offered by three students when asked what they would like teachers to
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Supporting Transgender Students
As teachers, our greatest charge may be moral: create a safe and responsive environment where all students learn. And that charge -- in the face of 12+ hour days, isolation, and little support -- can be hard to live out. But summoning the requisite courage and compassion is particularly essential
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I Want to Get Better at... Classroom Management
All teachers can learn more about how to make their classrooms more welcoming, productive places.
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Cultivating Student Empathy: Acting to Understand
How do we help students to move beyond their own perspectives to understand the lives of others? How do we challenge them to deeply understand another person whose life and experiences differ greatly from their own? How do we cultivate empathy, compassion, and even love across the lines of race,
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So You Wish It Had Been Different: Three First-Year Struggles
Join Sarah Brown Wessling to explore three first-year struggles and use them to launch yourself into a stronger year two.
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Tch Talks 20: Accessing Tangible Learning Outcomes Through Minecraft
Students may be the experts when it comes to the world of Minecraft, but teachers are the experts in curriculum design.
Teachers can use what they know best to design engaging, real-world experiences within Minecraft that are aligned with curriculum and standards and focused on a learning goal. Students can use
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I Want to get Better at... Growth Mindset
As you pack up your classroom, filing away lessons and deciding whether to keep or scrap student work samples, your mind may already be racing with ideas about ways you can make next year even better. You’ve probably heard about how having a growth mindset helps students to persist through
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Three Ways to Use Virtual Science Notebooks in the Early Grades
This is the first year that I've been using virtual notebooks in my classroom. At first, I was a bit nervous about trying this with six-year-olds, but I felt it could open up so many collaborative tools for my students.
We are a Title I public school in Rhode Island and
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Tch DIY: Kindergarten Math Routines
I'm always fascinated by math in the early grades. In kindergarten especially, it can be so challenging for teachers when students come into school with varying exposures to both language and mathematics, yet all of their ideas are incredibly intuitive, informal, complex, and foundational to the math they will encounter
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I Want to Get Better at... Organization Next Year
Dive into this list of organizational hacks that will help you be a more balanced and "together" teacher next year.
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Tch Talks 19: Women Leaders in Education: LaVonna Roth
LaVonna Roth is passionate, driven, successful, and accomplished. Yet, following what has become a theme among the women I’ve interviewed, she's human and thus, is challenged at times by her own self-doubt. As the founder of S.H. I. N. E. (an acronym for Service, Heart, Inspire, Navigate, and Exceptional), LaVonna
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Balance Is Not A Wish: Four Takeaways From #TchWellness
This entry is the seventh and final post in the series #TchWellness.
Over the past two years, I’ve worked diligently to balance my various life roles — mother, teacher, friend, fitness instructor, blogger, etc. Inspired by feelings of complete exhaustion and overwhelming emotion, I’ve been intensely driven to reduce the anxiety
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Tch Talks 18: Creativity and Learning with Minecraft
Minecraft Global Mentor Jessica Pilsner joins Tch Talks to discuss how we can help students express themselves and their original ideas through Minecraft. Listen as Jessica explains how she unleashes her students' creativity as they build and solve problems together within the world of Minecraft.
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Jessica Pilsner
Jessica Pilsner is a 6th-10th
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Get Creative with Minecraft!
Do you remember when you were a kid and you could spend hours in a sandbox or building with blocks? That sandbox could become anything -- a medieval castle, a turtle, or maybe even a bakery serving up sandy snickerdoodles. The possibilities were endless.
Being the type who likes to research,
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Fidgeting for Physics: Spinner Science in Six Steps
This time of year most of us are a little fidgety.
Summer is right around the corner, but as we're constantly reminding students “the year isn't over yet” and “don't give up,” some of us find ourselves needing the same pep talk from our administrators and social media networks. We're almost
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Top Five Vocabulary Strategies for English Language Learners
50,000 words by high school graduation.
That’s the challenge English Language Learners (ELLs) face if they want to catch up to their native English-speaking classmates. That’s almost 4,000 new words a year if a student begins school as a kindergartner!
But what about the English Language Learners who don’t enroll until middle
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Video Self-Reflection: What We Don't Know
I felt the blood rushing to my face. I was standing in front of a group of teachers presenting on a topic I was very familiar with and all of the sudden, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I was saying. The teachers were very gracious, but
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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: Teacher Appreciation All Year Long
Five years ago, I wrote my first blog for Teaching Channel. I'd just had my first child and was compelled to write a letter to her future teachers. Now she's had two miraculous preschool teachers and I'm continuously thankful for the love and care they’ve given my daughter. But, even
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Using Shared Structures to Build Literacy
Students at San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) come to us from all over the world. They come from the megalopolises of Hong Kong and Mexico City, from the deserts of Yemen and the high steppe of Mongolia. They come speaking the ancient indigenous languages of Central America, as well