FRIDAY HUMOR: How Teachers Feel About Punctuation (In Gifs)
When a student turns in a paper full of appropriately used commas: See more at Concordia University-Portland's Room 241 Blog #gifs #funny #humor #punctuation #teachers #teacherlife #justforfun #FridayHumor
How to Encourage Student Self-Efficacy
A confident classroom is a successful classroom. How do you build a culture of academic excellence in classrooms that promote student accountability, confidence, and success? By encouraging a growth mindset for all learners, finding ways to boost their confidence and their sense of academic potential. Here’s a look at a few ways to cultivate student self-efficacy. What is self-efficacy? According to Transforming Education, “Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to succ
How Positive Student-Teacher Relationships Create Resilient Learners
In her viral TED Talk “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” 40-year educator Rita Pierson, recounted a time when she heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” When most of us think back to our time in school, our stories tend to include the teachers with whom we had real, lasting connections. Our favorite teachers often changed our outlook on learning, made class fun, and inspired us to push beyond what
Empowering Teachers at EDxEDNYC 2019
It's that time of year! EDxEDNYC is back and ready for 2019! The EDxEDNYC Conference is June 6, 2019 from 9am-3:30pm. The EDxEDNYC Story Five years ago, a group of educators at Hudson High School of Learning Technologies wanted to make a difference in professional learning. After attending countless PD's and conferences, we noticed that teacher voice and choice were sorely lacking from professional development. Why weren't teachers learning from other teachers? Why did profes
March Malaise: Restorative Justice Stress Points
When reminiscing on the March Malaise and the stress points being surfaced with our current Restorative Justice practices, I recalled a similar issue I faced while teaching back in 2006. Thursday, March 30, 2006 Drowning* Imagine being in water fifteen feet deep, your arms are getting tired, and your feet can no longer help you maintain buoyancy. You begin to panic; your heart races; you desperately grasp for air. Nothing must be more frightening than those first moments a pe
SHARE: Setting Up Effective Group Work
Truly collaborative group work is complex and messy, so we have a few tips and tools to get students working interdependently. Research supports what we probably already knew about student collaboration: It’s integral to learning. We know that collaboration helps students build their interpersonal and social and emotional skills. We know that students don’t learn facts in a vacuum; social learning helps them build a more meaningful understanding of the world. Everyone loves c
SHARE: Teacher Efficacy: Why It Matters and How Administrators Can Help
Efficacy—or a teacher’s level of confidence about their ability—can greatly depend on past experiences or on their current school culture. A bad classroom experience or negative work environment, for example, can quickly sour a teacher’s confidence. Conversely, witnessing student growth and working in a collaborative environment can boost a teacher’s belief in their ability and improve performance. As you can imagine, school leaders play a critical role in developing teacher
SHARE: How a Focus on Independent Learning Transformed My Most At-Risk Students
The first time I saw Kevin, he shuffled into my classroom, staring sideways toward the floor. It was the third day of the new school year—he hadn’t made it to my room the first two days. “Hi. You must be Kevin,” I said with a smile. Kevin didn’t look at me. He only grunted a slight noise and looked around for a place to sit. As it turned out, Kevin was mostly non-verbal with emotional and learning disabilities. He was also an apathetic student who lacked the ability and desir
SHARE: A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem
Conversations focus on getting more black educators into the profession—but what if the problem starts with bias in hiring practices? Having just earned a teaching degree from Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, Rian Reed set out in 2011 to find a position working with special-needs students. Born and raised in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, she had built an enviable academic record, earning induction into the National Honor Society in high school and speaking at her
SHARE: Laptops And Phones In The Classroom: Yea, Nay Or A Third Way?
"If something on their desk or in their pocket dings, rings or vibrates — they will lose focus." "Students are doing so much in class, distraction and disruption isn't really something I worry about." How should teachers — both K-12 and college — deal with the use of computers and phones by students in class? On the one hand, those sleek little supercomputers promise to connect us to all human knowledge. On the other hand, they are also scientifically designed by some of the