The New Frontier

betheteacheryouloved:

How can teachers have more of a voice in these conversations?

Great read.

To open my 10th grade civics classes this semester, I asked my students to walk around, examine the syllabus, and look at the things in my classroom. They had to write down 5 things they saw, 5 things they thought because of what they saw, and 5 things they were wondering because of what they thought. It was a great exercise to break up the monotony of reading through the syllabus and practicing classroom procedures. I highly recommend it! Here were some of the most entertaining wonders:

What’s your favorite superhero?
Did you ever meet Ty Lawson or Tyler Hansbrough?
How many examples of single person change have there been in history?
Can we hide it the cabinets?
Why isn’t there a poster of Thomas Paine?
Is time really linear or do we just process it that way?
What do a Tar Heel and a ram have to do with each other?
Why should we learn civics?
What is your favorite color?
What books have influenced you?
Is the trailer air conditioned, or will we bake in the spring?
What are some of the big flaws our government has?
Mrs. Jolley I think we have a lot in common. Do you?

The link in the title has Harvard’s Visible Thinking site with an explanation and other applications of See-Think-Wonder. What do you do on the first day of class?

holtthink:

Dear App Developers,

I have a request for you, especially for you folks that are writing apps that save material to the cloud, like iCloud, or Google, or Evernote, or the new Documents:

I work in a school district that has a lot of iPads…I mean a lot. However, we…

world-shaker:

There’s even more awesome stuff if you click through :o)

Primary Source Sets – Sets of selected primary sources on specific topics, available as easy-to-print PDFs. Also, background information, teaching ideas, and tools to guide student analysis.

Presentations & Activities – Presentations and activities offer media-rich historical context or interactive opportunities for exploration to both teachers and students.

Collection Connections – Historical context and ideas for teaching with specific Library of Congress primary source collections.The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are on many teachers’ minds this school year, and the Library of Congress is ready to help. The Library’s teacher resources are a great fit for teachers trying to meet key CCSS goals, including critical thinking, analyzing informational texts, and working with primary sources. They’re all free, and finding them is as easy as going to www.loc.gov/teachers.

betheteacheryouloved:

mrskaaay:

mrskaaay:

Teaching, nerdosity & other debauchery: A stupid classroom management problem…help!

betheteacheryouloved:

mrskaaay:

Help me out, tumblr!

In one of my classes, I have a group of super awesome kids, plus 3 kids who like to cause trouble. Some of my super awesome kids…

For redirecting behavior it goes like this:

Step one: eye contact. We practice and show them what “the look” is so they understand the difference between friendly eye contact and “fix your behavior” eye contact. We also have small signs that say “This is eye contact, fix your behavior” or something similar, but I don’t use them much because my face is expressive enough to convey when they need to stop.

Step two: Proximity. Stand near enough the student to make your presence known.

Step three: Lightly tap them on the shoulder.

Steps 1-3 are all to redirect without interrupting instruction (as long as you aren’t like, tied to your document camera or trying to conference with a small group)

Step four: private conference. Privately ask the student if they know what they are doing wrong and to please make better choices, etc.

Step five: they call home. There is a script posted by the phone that reads something like, “Mom, dad, I am calling home because Mrs. Kaaaay asked me to correct my behavior 4 times today and I continued to misbehave. She will call you later today to talk to you about it.”

I rarely get to five. If five doesn’t work, I call a principal and it becomes an office referral.

How our house points work:

Each homeroom is a “house” and they each have an icon in classdojo.com. Whenever a student shows one of the 5 school expectations (honesty, excellence, attitude, respect, teamwork), a teacher can ask them to go give themselves a point for whatever their behavior fell into. You can also do negative points but we only use those during homeroom period. Before every break, we award a paper trophy to be taped above the winning homeroom’s door. Then we restart the points. This is helpful because sometimes one homeroom will be ahead by hundreds of points, so the ones in 4th and 5th place start feeling hopeless. At the end of the year, the homeroom who one the paper trophy the most will get an actual trophy to display in the trophy case in the lobby of the school.

I do some individual awards. We hand out paper hearts that are kind of like lottery tickets that get drawn on Fridays. I occasionally give out candy and stickers. I avoid candy during most classes because we have a lot of kids with allergies and/or diabetes this year. I also try to slather on verbal praise, like, “You worked really hard today! I am so proud of you!” or “It really impressed me that you kept working when I could tell you were frustrated. That says a lot about your character.” etc.

About using chronic absentees: I know this is a wonderful problem to have but: I rarely have empty desks! Our school hovers around 97% attendance every day! In fact, my school won the best attendance trophy 3 months out of four! So I just have to be super careful about who’s wear. I do try to use empty seats whenever possible, but it feels like my tricky classes get the schedule changes and new kids the most frequently, ha ha.

Solid redirection strategies! At one of my schools, we had what was identified as a challenging class - imagine your 3 bad babies are more like 9 bad babies who then influence the rest of your class. As a grade team, we basically redid the consequence ladder and made it shorter, so the consequences became more serious more quickly. In your example, it would be something like A (Choose Step 1, 2 or 3) to B (Step 4/5) to C (Referral). Do you think something like that would be worth a try before making contracts with the students?

Love this advice!

1) Countless Small Wins

I’m hard-pressed to think of another profession with the potential to have so many small victories and breakthroughs every day.

Take this past Wednesday, for example. Jujuan, Deonte, and several other students voluntarily stayed after school for English tutoring. They helped me teach a student from another class, Anthony, about appositives and complex sentences. They raced up to the whiteboard grasping green and blue dry erase markers and explained the basic structure of a literary analysis paragraph. They wanted to be there, to get better. I smiled inside and out. Pretty big win.

Not sure I agree with #2, but this article does make you feel a little better about the previous post. 

Not from someone in my school district, but some of these things I can’t deny. From the article:

I refuse to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and most overloaded people I know.

I refuse to watch my family struggle financially as I work in a job to which I have invested 6 long years of my life in preparation. I have a graduate degree and a track record of strong success, yet I’m paid less than many two-year degree holders. And forget benefits—they are effectively nonexistent for teachers in North Carolina.

I refuse to watch my district’s leadership tell us about the bad news and horrific changes coming towards us, then watch them shrug incompetently, and then tell us to work harder.

I refuse to listen to our highly regarded superintendent telling us that the charter school movement is at our doorstep (with a soon-to-be-elected governor in full support) and tell us not to worry about it, because we are applying for a grant from Race to the Top. There is no consistency here; there is no leadership here.

Thoughts? 

The most remarkable experience I have on Twitter, and it’s right up there with the very best learning experiences I’ve ever had over my lifetime as an educator, an astrophysicist, and a learner, is #edchat. Every Tuesday night at 7:00 pm Eastern Time, I join hundreds of educators from across the planet that get comfortable in front of their computers—a very local and personal experience—and have a global, free-for-all conversation about education. The operation of Twitter as the vehicle for communication quickly recedes into the background, and you enter into a world of rapid-paced vibrant conversations with folks as committed as you to sharing important ideas. You leave with new thoughts, new directions, a reinvigorated sense that the issues of importance to you are also important to others—providing a common bond, and you embrace friends you’ve never met but that you deeply understand.

Join us for #edchat, #sschat, and #psychat!

jfklibrary:

Today marks the first day of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the most perilous moments in American history, and certainly the greatest test of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. To mark this momentous occasion, we will be tweeting archival documents, audio and video clips, and quotes from the Kennedy administration with our historical Twitter account, @JFK1962. Follow every crucial moment from the #13days here!

This would be great as a model for a student project! #sschat

scholasticbookclubs:

People generally aren’t shy when they talk about the books that have changed their lives. Some mention The Cat in the Hat and how successfully reading that book turned them into readers. Others mention how Atticus Finch helped them discover that they felt a responsibility to seek justice for…

Thanks for sharing!

Not a ton of substance in this PDF, but it might be a good place to start when planning a lesson on the debates. 

A nice argument for how common core will require a major change, but how we should also be careful not to cut back too much on non-expository texts. Yes to all of that. Excerpt: 

“Argument and exposition are important skills, but they build upon and incorporate the richness of the narratives that give most children their first opportunities to write (and talk) at length.

In the current enthusiasm for expository text, we need to be sure we don’t cut the roots of the very skills we are trying to nourish. When we look at the end goals of education, the achievements in reading, writing, and language that are outlined in the Common Core are not a curriculum, but rather the kinds of oral and written language skills that students should be engaging as they explore issues that matter in literature and in life. And when students do this as a matter of course, we will have the real writing revolution.”