Reflections on Teaching

Sometimes I worry that all the emphasis on direct instruction, comprehensive curriculum, and teacher-proof texts has beaten the last bit of initiative out of the latest generation of elementary school teachers. Here’s some background…
First, let me go into the way back machine to how things were in the old old days. When I attended school [...]

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Thank you very much for having me in your IB Theory of Knowledge Class on Tuesday. Here were some of the things that I saw while I was in your class:

You started with warmup which was to write down three main points for creating a good presentation for an upcoming project.
Speed dating was next. You [...]

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This week, at Larry Ferlazzo’s prompting, I did lessons on self-control with my upper-grade students (fourth through sixth or age 9 – 12).
Lesson One: I started off by recreating the Mischel “Marshmallow” experiment. I told students that I would give them three skittles or M & Ms,  and that if they didn’t eat any of [...]

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Lots of stuff happening, and a lot has been coming together is some really nice ways. No major complaints this week.
First up, second graders continued work on their story telling unit (Sharing Stories in Open Court Reading). I started a VoiceThread where I asked students to share lessons learned from the fairytale we watched (Red [...]

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Larry Ferlazzo did a post on an interesting lesson he did with his students to get them to think about their own brains. He wrote about it here, noting that many of his lowest students felt they were just “stupid”. I had done a similar lesson with one fourth grade class today, and shared this [...]

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What went well…
VoiceThread
VoiceThread has really become my go to for building background or schema with my students, and I think it’s about the easiest tool for doing this.  Others have derided VoiceThread as unaesthetic, but unless you are trained in Waldorf you would be hard pressed to come up with better looking K-W-L charts (which [...]

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This line comes from the values statement at my congregation, and it got me thinking about whether I was really living up to that goal. This post is the result of some of that reflection and will included references to my religion in a way that I hope is not annoying or offensive.  As they [...]

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Just a reminder, the deadline for submissions to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is coming up on May 31st, so don’t delay, get those submissions now before you miss your chance!
We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. Need an example? Check [...]

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