Making a Difference In my experience, there are three types of teachers walking on to campus for their first day of school this month and each has a distinctly different focus: Creating a Good Learning Environment Teacher A spent the last four weeks of summer vacation organizing and decorating her classroom. She sat in front…
Narrower and Deeper Look at the two 5th grade assessment questions above. The first question is from a 2012 California Standards Test. The second question is from a 2014 Smarter Balanced Common Core assessment. In the first question, students only need to remember the formula for volume and complete the calculation. In the second question,…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and discuss its potential impact on classroom instruction. Below…
PowerPoint is one of the most utilized technology tools to deliver content to students. Most teachers, if not all, have created or used a PowerPoint lesson in their classroom. Even though PowerPoint is widely used in education and has been around for a long time, most people do not use it to its full potential.…
As an avid reader, the twists and turns of the written word have always been an interest to me. Each time I reread a book, I learn something new that I overlooked the time before. Generating this epiphany in students is the hope of most teachers. Re-reading stories is about the discovery of something that…
With increasing expectations  and new standards, it can be tempting to throw everything (including the proverbial kitchen sink) at our students. Doing so may, in fact, hinder learnersâ understanding of a topic and have the opposite of the desired effect. Instead, by applying research-based strategies, we can ensure that even complex topics are presented in…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and discuss its potential impact on classroom instruction.…
Vocabulary development is a critical aspect of teaching, especially in classes or schools with high populations of English Learners. Differentiating between the types of vocabulary can help teachers decide how much effort to put into teaching particular vocabulary words, as well as which strategies will be most effective when teaching the words. In todayâs post,…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and discuss…
Headed to Costco on a Saturday afternoon, you pull your car up to a gas pump, slide your credit card through the reader, select the appropriate grade of fuel and begin pumping. Then you head into the big box store, gather the items on your list, and line them up on a conveyor belt for…