4 Steps to Instructional Excellence What is a culture of instructional excellence? It’s a place where teachers and administrators focus on providing excellent instruction for students. It’s a place where everyone knows what excellence looks and feels like, and the whole team supports the goal of obtaining it. Dr. Edwin Feulner, president of The Heritage…
How do EDI and Common Core Standards work together? Let us begin with understanding the terminology to avoid miscommunication. Common Core refers to educational standards created at the national level. Common Core standards are organized by subject and grade. Many teachers have been misled to believe that Common Core requires inquiry learning, project-based learning, or…
Educeri is Here We are proud to report that our new service, Educeri, is officially up and running! What is Educeri, you ask? Educeri (ed-ju-sair-ee) is a subscription-based lesson service that gives users unlimited access to hundreds of digital K-12 resources from any device. Through Educeri, we are committed to providing lessons – awesome ones…
What makes one teacher’s class a joy and another’s a torture? Were some people simply born to teach? As we remember our favorite teachers, I think we remember a je ne sais quoi, an indefinable quality, about them most. When we ask the world what makes a teacher great, the word “passionate” comes up every…
Parental Involvement Parents are their children’s first teachers. Children learn about life from the examples and expectations set by their parents or guardian. Once children start attending school, their social and educational world expands by leaps and bounds. But it is essential for parents, those first important teachers, to stay involved in their child’s…
For more than 50 years, success gurus in the business world have been urging employers and employees to work smarter not harder. In business, it often means to think big, delegate more, and let technology work for you. It’s often recommended for people who are overwhelmed with details, facing multiple deadlines, and feeling stressed out…
Anyone who has been teaching for a few years knows that teachers face huge amounts of stress. It comes unremittingly from 20-120 students all demanding attention, and from administrative requests for meetings and paperwork, and parental requests about how Johnny’s doing. In the midst of this, a teacher has to prepare daily lessons, correct assignments,…
In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Education released the National Education Technology Plan. As we’ve mentioned in earlier Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 this plan is a broad vision for schools and districts to implement technology for learning. In this post, we will look more closely at the big ideas for assessment…
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…
Automaticity does not mean that teachers become automatons – glorified robots just walking through their classes. No, automaticity means that teaching skills have been learned so well, they have become so ingrained, that they are automatic. Just like when we learned to drive a car, the first attempts were focused on details and we had lots of…