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 sat in front…
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…
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…