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I AM Poetry? by: Laura McDonell
Listen The Possibility of Being a Natural Poet You Are A Poet I have had several identities throughout my life. There are several things I belong to. However, when I heard that I was a poet, I was surprised. I have never thought of myself as someone who writes poetry....
Take the LEAP Creating A Classroom Of Courageous and Empowered Learners By: Laura McDonell
Listen Having courage means doing something when the answer of how it will turn out is unknown. It is Not Always Easy to Be Courageous Courage is not something that comes naturally to everyone. And even when it is a familiar value, it is not always easy to practice courage...
I Never Thought About That What If My Assumptions were Wrong By: Laura McDonell
Listen The Student Perspective Seeing things from the student’s perspective is challenging. After watching one of Dr. Kevin Leichtman’s videos, I realized that there might be a few things regarding education that I have never thought about. Understanding motivations behind student actions is a priority. The Perfect Ten offered me...
Add More Music How the Pepper Effect Taps into the Magic of Creativity, Collaboration and Innovation by: Laura McDonell
Listen Where words fail, music speaks. (Hans Christian Anderson) A Must Read A few weeks ago, I read The Pepper Effect by Sean Gaillard. After reading Gaillard’s book, I gained a new perspective on how I can do things differently to achieve the impossible. The book helped me to think...
The Guts to be Not Good by: Laura McDonell
Listen How Starting Before your Ready is the Key to Success Three years ago, my middle son Luke decided that he wanted to play hockey. He taught himself how to skate on our pond and was determined to try a new sport. Luke decided he was willing to start at...
Seeing My Students by: Laura McDonell
Listen Looking and seeing are two different things. (John Paul Caponigro) Allowing someone the opportunity to be seen and noticed is a gift. When I think about how many times I have quickly glanced around the classroom to “see” that my students are present and what they are working on,...
Create More Space by Laura McDonnell
Discovering Ways to Empower and Connect in the Classroom What is the best way to set up your classroom? What is the best use of space in the classroom? And, how can we continue creating spaces for students to thrive? Because each teacher is different, each makeup of students is...
Space for Not Yet - by Laura McDonnell
Listen A delay is not a denial. (Vernon Wright) Embrace the Not Yet Space One of the most challenging things is not being where we want to be. It is difficult to realize that there is space between where we are and where we want to go. I choose to...
It’s Not Just About Books by Laura McDonell
Listen Understanding What’s Involved in Learning What if someone who had a lot of professional knowledge in an area said something you disagreed with? What if the path you were on was ready to take a turn, and you had not seen it coming? A Life-Changing Podcast Last week I...
Change the Behavior, Change the Class (Part Three) by Hollie Hamaker
Listen When I think of the word "mentorship," I think of some ideal mentors. Professor Dumbledore and Gandalf are some of the first mentors that come to my mind. However, I should start putting my fellow teachers on that list. In the final installment of "Change the Behavior, Change the...
The Best Choices are Right in Front of You by Laura McDonell
Listen Rearrange the ¨Furniture¨ and Discover a New Perspective Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was to rearrange my bedroom. I loved the opportunity to have my bed facing a new direction, a chance to slide the dresser into a new location and enjoy seeing things from...
The Stay-at-Home Gratitude Scavenger Hunt by Laura McDonell
Listen Re-Discovering the Blessings that Surround Us “No duty is more urgent than giving thanks.” (James Allen) Being grateful is not automatic. Practicing gratitude is one of the quickest ways to lift your spirits and lift the spirits of people around you. How do People Respond? When asked what they...
Dear First Year Teacher by Hollie Hamaker
Listen Dear First Year Teacher, Let me start by thanking you for joining the teaching profession. I am sure many have tried to scare you away. But you chose to become a teacher anyway. Although the statistics vary, roughly 20 to 30 percent of teachers quit in their first...
A New Way To Improve: What it Looks Like to Get 1% Better Each Day By Laura McDonell
Listen Last weekend I was inspired by a story. Chris Nikic became the first person with down syndrome to complete an Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run completed in under 17 hours). Completing an Ironman Triathlon requires grit, determination, perseverance and stamina that most people only...
Change the Behavior, Change the Class (Part Two) by Hollie Hamaker
Listen In the second installment about changing behavior, we will talk about how rewards can impact your classroom. I highly recommend reading the first article before reading this one, as I reference it at one point a few paragraphs below. Some days, it seems impossible to create an atmosphere in...
Reformation: Attitudes About Student Learning Ability
Listen We’ve all heard the idea that every student can learn, but believing that takes on a whole new level of faith when you’re in the trenches with struggling students. Our gut instinct is to get out of the situation and hand that student over to someone “more qualified” to...
Reformation: Content Delivery
Listen Lecture is incredibly difficult to get away from, isn’t it? Even in the earlier grades, it’s often difficult to let go and let discover rather than presenting all the information known to mankind in the areas in which we are certified experts. Science tells us that lecture is ineffective...
Book Review: The Distance Learning Playbook
Listen I was mowing the yard, listening to some education podcasts a couple of weeks ago, and listened to two different podcasters interview the authors of The Distance Learning Playbook: Teaching for Engagement & Impact in Any Setting. First, it was Justin Baeder of Principal Center Radio interviewing Douglas Fisher....
Reformation: Adjusting Responsibilities of Learning and Control
Listen In the past, both the responsibility for learning and classroom control rested squarely on the shoulders of the teacher. If your students were loud and misbehaving, or if they failed a standardized test, you were not only held responsible for it in a figurative sense. Instead, you could lose...
Reformation: Identifying Sources of Inspiration
Listen One of the purposes of this series of articles was to talk about schools, leaders, administrators, philosophers of education, technologists, architects, and teachers who were visibly succeeding in education and making an impact. But our eleven schools are notably only a small sampling. Since beginning this series, we’ve heard...
Reformation: Embracing the Outdoors
Listen In this article, we’ll take a step away from our eleven leaders and reach a bit further out, because there are many schools around the world who have used the opportunity the pandemic has provided to be outdoors more. Pre-pandemic, many schools and districts in the U.S. added more...
Part 2: Reformation: Indoor Learning Environments
Listen In our last article, we discussed how the Ron Clark Academy, Wooranna Park Primary, and Fuji Yochien embrace and have designed environments that are used to fulfill their mission statements and pedagogy. Here are a few more leaders in this area. International School of Hellerup in Copenhagen The International...
Answering "Why" in Professional Development
Listen Years ago, I was in a professional development meeting that tackled the topic of adding “essential questions” to each of our planned lessons. There was instruction on the language we should use, the structure of the questions themselves, and how to tie each question to state standards. Yet I...
Elementary Focus: Dolls for SEL and Social Studies
Listen There are few adults who spend any time with kids who haven’t heard of the “Toy Story” franchise. In one of the movies, the toys gather around a new playmate, Forky, created by the child who is the center of their world.The child in the movie makes this “doll”...
Education Podcasts, Part 2: What We Have Learned from Them
Listen We wanted to share some of what we have learned recently from the education podcasts we have been listening to. Principal Center Radio Douglas Fisher - The Distance Learning Playbook (Jul 31) Douglas Fisher’s has some great, practical tips on distance learning! He suggests that teachers should integrate synchronous...
The Class Is Half Full
Listen There is a lot for us to complain about when it comes to where we find ourselves as teachers these days. This is arguably the most difficult time to be a teacher in several decades. We are all relearning how to teach. Anxiety and stress are at all-time highs...
How to Be an Approachable Leader
Listen We’ve all had an administrator say that their door is always open, only to find out it was just something they said. Their door is literally closed nearly every time you walk through the office. Perhaps their door is always open, but they are never in there, so what...
Teacher Reflections After Returning to School
Listen For many teachers, administrators, and school employees around the world, August has meant returning to campus for the first time in 4 or 5 months. Some are teaching to cameras in empty classrooms while others are trying to figure out how to teach with masks covering the expressions of...
Careers That Fit Well with Education Experience
Listen There are quite a few educators currently out of employment due to the financial repercussions of the pandemic. There are others who are okay for this year but may be facing a similar fate in the near future. There are many others who have lost wages, or for whom...
Your Most Marketable Skills, Part 2
Listen Leadership and Management, Data, Technology, and Social Skills Educators are being released from districts around the U.S. due to financial difficulties. Some teachers are having to find more conducive work environments due to districts either doing virtual, in-class learning, or some combination that just doesn’t work for them. Others...
Your Most Marketable Skills, Part 1
Listen Communication, Instruction, and Complex Thinking Skills Educators in some parts of the U.S. have started seeing the economic repercussions of the pandemic. Some places have started to shed staff as budgets crumble and belts tighten.In other places, teachers are finding returning to teaching in the fall in either virtual...
Teaching Culturally Responsive Literature: Part 3, Hispanic/Latinx Literature
Listen Students of Latin heritage cannot be placed into a box, though they are often stereotyped. While there are 20 countries in Central and South America, many teachers just assume that Hispanic students are of Mexican descent. Trouble with the English language is often quite incorrectly associated with an...
Teaching Culturally Responsive Literature: Part 2, African American Literature
Listen Many teachers and administrators are grappling with how to address the social concerns that the recent events in our country have brought up. The truth is that the protests and riots have only brought to the forefront issues that our students carry with them into our classrooms every day. ...
The Next Pandemic - Mental Illness
Listen The pandemic of COVID-19 leaves behind more than physical health changes for the general population in its wake. Many doctors, psychiatrists, and health advisers (including the CDC and WHO) are telling the medical community and the public to brace themselves for the next big pandemic - mental illness. Many...
Be the Change
Listen If you’ve ever walked into a break room at lunchtime, you know that all of the educational experts are sitting in that room talking about the problems and solutions of day-to-day classroom life. And yet, it seems as though the experts are never the people making the decisions! Teachers...
Troubleshooting for Elementary Blended Learning in the Classroom
Listen In our last article, we explored what blended learning looks like in the elementary classroom setting. Because blended learning is used a lot more in the late elementary and secondary settings, there are some “kinks” to be worked out. Here are some suggestions on ways to do that. All...
Elementary Classroom-Based Blended Learning
Listen There are many more resources available for blended learning in the secondary classroom, and the idea of blended learning is, on the whole, a bit of a different challenge for elementary teachers because so much of it relies on technology. Remote aspects of blended learning are even more complicated,...
How Other Countries Are Coping with Restarting School
Listen Students and educators alike have been terribly disappointed by the fact that school won’t be resuming face-to-face classes for this school year. Although there are many disadvantages to those involved in remote learning, there are some things that can be taken into consideration as advantages. One great advantage is...
Non-Standard Units of Measurement in Early Math
We recently had a great question from a teacher. She asked if anyone else hated teaching non-standard units of measurement in math. That reminded those of us who teach math of many years of the same frustration and struggle. However, when we sat down and talked about it as a...
Remote Learning Idea #4: Teaching with Movies
Listen Alright class, today we are going to study the historical and cultural context of England during the Neoclassical Period which spanned from roughly 1600 to wah-waah wah-waah wah-waah-waah-waaaaaaaaaaaaah... This is bad enough during a “normal” school year (whatever that means) in a traditional classroom. It can be so frustrating...
Remote Learning Idea #3: Do-able Poetry Intro or Review
Listen How can 6 little letters elicit such fear, dread, anxiety, and memories of failure and defeat? And, that’s just for the teachers! Many of us literature nerds love poetry. You probably remember how excited you were building your poetry packet your first year teaching ELAR. The other teachers on...
Increasing the Educational Value of Field Trips
Listen ‘Tis the season for field trips! Often, teachers view this as sort of a holiday. We may divvy up students among vetted parent volunteers and spend the day with only one or two of our students, looking around and enjoying the scenery. This is nice for us, but there...
Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD)
Listen What Is ODD? Oppositional Defiance Disorder is a behavioral disorder. According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms include persistent angry or irritable moods, extreme defiance for authority figures, frequent need to argue, and vindictiveness. Students with ODD most often deal with other disorders simultaneously and in addition to ODD. Frequent...
Providing Meaningful Professional Development
Listen If we’re being honest, most of us have been subjected to hours of professional development that either didn’t apply to us, didn’t interest us, or were not the best use of our time. If we’re being honest, few among us have neglected to grade papers we’ve smuggled into a...
Pro Tips for Integrating Social Studies into Other Subjects
Listen Social Studies is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated subjects for many teachers, which is unfortunate because social studies is a goldmine for ELAR, LOTE, math, science, and fine arts integration. There are so many things that can be taught and expanded upon with information in social studies. ...
Dysgraphia and Writing Disorders: Beginning with Dyslexia
Listen The first cases of dyslexia were written about in the 1880s, around the time both Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham were both born. In the 1920s, the two had started working toward what is now known as the Orton-Gillingham approach, which laid the foundation for educating students with dyslexia...
Dealing with Difficult Parents -In the Elementary Setting
Listen The relationships we build with families through the school are unique and sometimes filled with complications. We tend to feel very strongly about our students, and we wouldn’t be in the education profession if we didn’t want the best for each one of them. Yet, we often forget that...
Great Games for Learning, Part 4: Math Games for 3rd-5th Graders
Listen Math is one of the best areas to use board games as practice and review for learning skills. Math just lends itself so nicely to gameplay. We’ve searched for some of our favorite board, dice, and card games that can be used for building math skills and placed them...
Helping Underachieving Students: In Middle and High School
Listen It can be so frustrating to have a student in class who you know can be doingmuch better than they actually are. It may be that the student started the yearstrong and something happened to them personally that made them start to slackoff. For some it could be caused...
Teachers as Facilitators
Listen Recently in a conversation with colleagues, one of our writers overheard a seasoned educator say, “Children can’t learn on their own. It’s obvious! Otherwise, there would be no need for teachers.” And there was a time - fairly recently, even - when that was true. However, now any child...