This is one of my favorite strategies to teach my classes- and my life as a teacher has become so much easier since I implemented a few key steps. My teaching partner and I experienced our very first Turn and Talk as participants in a workshop by Bobb Darnell in 2008 and we've been using it with students and adults ever since. I have ... read more
Nonfiction Text Strategies
Do I really need to explicitly teach reading strategies in my class? Yes. Science news articles, social studies chapter sections, primary source documents... These are all fabulous resources to use in our classrooms! We have to make sure however, that we are teaching students how to consume the content. While our students may be able to ... read more
Daily ELA Warm Ups
As a middle school ELA teacher, I became aware very quickly that there are NOT enough minutes in a class period to possibly address all of the Common Core State Standards. After experimenting with a variety of different lesson planning and scheduling strategies, I landed on this. Whether you call them warm ups, bell ringers or do nows- ... read more
Fact Fluency and Number Sense in Sixth Grade
A while back I took stock of what we were doing as a math department to improve kids' math fluency. It seemed that every year we had a chunk of kids who came up to sixth grade with amazing fact fluency. We had another chunk who fought with basic addition and multiplication much like struggling readers fought with multisyllabic words. I ... read more
3 Steps to a Classroom Reset
Sometimes we all just need a classroom reset. Do you want your students to behave or do you want more than that? If you spend all day managing behaviors, you are EXHAUSTED by 3:00. I know!!! I've been there. It takes so much mental energy, so much executive functioning to anticipate every fire that might start- and to put out all of ... read more
Classroom Success Stories: Running on Autopilot
Classroom management or dumb luck? One of my goals as a teacher was always to have one of those classrooms that could run on autopilot. You know the classroom- you walk in and hear a low hum of learning. Different students are engaged in different activities, in different groupings and you have to really scan the room to find the teacher. ... read more
Engaged in Math Class
There are three groups of kids sitting in front of me every time I teach a lesson. I think I've finally figured out how to get all of them engaged in math class!! There are the kids the standards had in mind. Engaged. These kids are ready. If the lesson is adding fractions with unlike denominators, these kids understand the difference ... read more
Teaching Fractions: 3 Keys
If you're thinking about fractions, you might be a 5th grade teacher... Thanks to the Common Core State Standards, fifth grade now throws the wildest fraction party on the block! I taught 6th grade math back when that was fraction central, and I learned 3 key things along the way. They have been just applicable in the 5th grade classrooms ... read more
Talking About Fractions in Math Class
"The ones that are doing the talking are doing the learning." I know that. But, no matter how many times I say it, the impact on student learning in front of me is profound and somehow surprising. There is no example stronger than that of talking about fractions in math class. I've spent most of my career spending part of every school ... read more
Fractions and Decimals Made Easy
If teaching fifth and sixth graders has taught me anything, it's that fractions and decimals can be ABSTRACT and TRICKY... and that kids have to be developmentally ready to perform operations on them. The good news is- the standards aren't encouraging us to get kids to add, subtract, multiply and divide 5/32 and 16/71! We make equivalent ... read more
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