SPOOKY SEASON IS HERE! This is my FAVORITE holiday! I love everything about it – the ghosts, the skeletons, the Edgar Allan Poe! I want to celebrate with my kiddos, but I’m usually mid-way through a unit or racing against the clock ticking toward the end of the quarter. I also usually want to cover my butt in case admin wants to see a lesson plan or know what standard I am teaching! Worst case scenario, I hit play on a spooky, kid-friendly Spotify playlist while working on our regularly scheduled schoolwork ( sad face). However, I usually figure out a way to sneak one of these activities into my…
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Teacher How To: Backward Planning Your ENTIRE School Year
There are endless aspects of teaching that cause me stress and anxiety over the course of the school year. Managing each student’s needs, developing positive relationships with parents, clubs, meetings, grading, duties, extra demands from admin… you know, all those things that pop up during the school year that are mostly beyond my control. I realized that I needed to really focus my energy on the things I CAN control, which is why I started backward planning my entire school year. Why I Backward Plan So Far In Advance What I’ve learned from backward planning is that it’s counterintuitive, but if I have a detailed outlined plan for each quarter…
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The Truth About Summer Reading
My Experience with Summer Reading as a Student I’ll never forget my first summer reading assignment. Up until my junior year of high school, I went to school online. I begged my parents to let me go to a real school, and I got enrolled at a local charter school. Then I received my summer reading assignment. Now, I have always loved reading. Ever since I figured out how to do it, I would read anything that stood still long enough. During the summer when my brother was outside riding his bike or playing basketball I would always be up in my room, curled up in a big armchair, reading…
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It’s Not a Secret: Grading Homework is Harming Our Students
Colleagues, parents, and students are usually taken aback by the fact that I don’t assign grades for formative tasks like classwork or homework. There are so many reasons that assigning a letter or percentage grade is inequitable, unjust, and a poor practice. If you’re curious about more strategies for equitable grading, I encourage you to check out Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. This book started it all for me! Let me tell you why I stopped grading homework and what I do instead! First, I call it homework, but that can mean different things for different people! What I mean by “homework” is any classwork that is designed to…
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It’s Time to Get Rid of Extra Credit
When I first started teaching, I offered all kinds of random extra credit. If students brought me supplies, like tissues. If students saw a movie related to the novel we were studying in class. If students finished their work early, and I had them do random tasks around the classroom. I also had enrichment tasks ready for extra credit too. It took me a long time to realize that my extra credit opportunities were inequitable, and let me to get rid of extra credit. Let me explain why. WHY DO STUDENTS ASK FOR EXTRA CREDIT? What I came to realize, though was that the opportunities I was giving were unfair…
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Stop Penalizing Late Work in the Classroom
Anytime I mention the fact that stopped penalizing late work in my classroom, I can FEEL the judgment coming from other teachers, especially old-school ones. Even if they don’t verbally criticize my policy, their eyes say it all. “How do you expect kids to learn about deadlines?” “The real world doesn’t let you turn things in whenever you want!” “Back in my day….” I get it, I do… after all, I am a product of a school system that penalized late work. But – listen. In the real world, you can almost always get an extension on your taxes You can be 5 minutes late for a meeting Real adult…
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Teacher How To: Scaffolding Socratic Seminar
Socratic Seminars are one of my all- time favorite teaching strategies. I love seeing a group of students engage in a collaborative discussion and think deeply about themes, texts, and ideas under their own guidance. This is a skill that is not natural for students, who are used to teacher- led discussion, so I started scaffolding Socratic Seminar to build the skills necessary to make my Seminars successful for all of my students. Seminars not only strengthen students’ ability to engage in dialogue with many differing beliefs, it also requires students to think deeply and critically, using evidence and logic to support their claims. While impromptu whole class discussions are…
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ELA Strategies I Love: Hexagonal Thinking
Have you ever heard of or seen a new teaching strategy from a coworker and said, “I have to try that TOMORROW!”? That was me last week when I heard about Hexagonal Thinking from the Brave New Teaching Podcast. It just SOUNDS cool. I immediately paused my podcast, put down my vacuum ( because who doesn’t listen to podcasts while they’re cleaning? It’s a thing, I swear), and ran to my computer. I googled “Hexagonal Thinking” and found Betsy Potash’s incredibly innovative strategy for critical thinking on her Spark Creativity blog. I was immediately obsessed and worked it into my Hamlet lesson for the next week. Here’s how the Hexagonal…
