I have never particularly enjoyed talking on the phone. Long before I was a teacher, I would avoid answering calls whenever I could. Teaching did not magically turn me into someone eager to spend planning time dialing numbers. It did make the purpose harder to ignore. Home-school communication is not a public-relations exercise and it…
Tests and quizzes have their place. Sometimes a short quiz is exactly what a teacher needs. If the goal is to find out whether students remember vocabulary, can solve a particular type of problem, or understand the main ideas from yesterday’s lesson, there is nothing inherently wrong with asking them some questions and checking the…
There is a kind of lesson that looks terrific from the hallway. Students are moving around. Materials are spread across the tables. Somebody is measuring something. Somebody else is building something. The room is noisy in what appears to be a productive way. It certainly looks like learning. Maybe it is. Hands-on learning can be…
Social-emotional learning does not have to be a separate Friday activity or another program squeezed into an already crowded schedule. Much of it can be taught in the moments that already happen: entering the room, beginning difficult work, asking for help, disagreeing with a classmate, recovering from a mistake, and reflecting before leaving. That does…
Planning a specific classroom task?Try the EL Task Access Planner to choose language supports while keeping the learning goal intact. Students who are learning English bring knowledge, experiences, ideas, and one or more languages to the classroom. Learning English does not make a student less capable of reasoning about literature, mathematics, science, history, or any…
Teachers tell students to study all the time. We say, “Review your notes,” “Start the project early,” or “Make sure you are ready for the test.” Then we are surprised when some students reread a page, highlight almost everything, or wait until the night before because they do not know what “study” is supposed to…
An engaging classroom is not necessarily loud, entertaining, decorated, digital, or filled with constant activity. It is a classroom in which students can enter the work, understand its purpose, participate without unnecessary risk, receive useful feedback, and do the thinking the learning requires. That is a higher standard than “students looked busy.” The research literature…
Effective classroom management is not the ability to make every student quiet. It is the set of conditions that protects safety, attention, participation, and recovery when behavior goes off course. Discipline is part of that work, but discipline should not mean waiting for a rule to be broken and then finding a punishment. The most…
A lesson plan is a prediction about the future. You are deciding what you want students to learn, what you think will help them learn it, how you will know whether it worked, and roughly how long all of this is going to take. Then actual students arrive. That last part has a way of…
When a teacher asks, “How do I actually begin teaching a child to read?” the answer can feel surprisingly hard to pin down. That is the practical question behind every useful explanation of how to teach reading to beginners. Reading is not one skill, and a useful lesson has to do more than hand a…