Teacher to teacher

The development of caring bonds between teachers and their students not only nurtures healthy emotional and social development in young people but can also improve academic achievement. My students succeed because they believe I care about them. This motivates them to believe in themselves, stay focused, work hard and never give up.

With the current conversation about the common core and college readiness, it is necessary for students to learn as early as elementary school how to talk about their learning. We should expose children to the different modes of learning and help them articulate which one suits them best.

Toe to toe across a desk, we examine a project together. Nothing supplants the time spent during a one-on-one conference in propelling students’ progress — not just with their work, but with their growth as human beings, too. Too often students sit lost in a sea of other seemingly knowing bodies, afraid to admit they don’t get it.

How to take a test is something you can teach your students if you follow some simple guidelines and your students do their part by making a good-faith effort to prepare for it. The following methods can work for multiple-choice exams and essays, too.

Early childhood educators will face questions this school year about how best to align early childhood programs with the new Common Core State Standards. Developmentally appropriate practices and understanding what research tells us about how young children learn are the building blocks that are key to addressing this important issue.

Do your students want a say in how things work in your classroom? Giving students choices in the classroom can actually open more opportunities for student engagement, motivation and differentiated instruction.

How do we, as educators, hold students accountable for active class participation and for homework? A teacher offers a few easy-to-integrate classroom strategies that are useful across grade levels and various subjects.

Assessment is a huge part of an early childhood educator’s day. As time-consuming as this is, I believe that emergent readers should be assessed at least every month. Running records are the most common sources of reading assessment, and the most important part of the running record is not calculating the child’s score at the end; it’s carefully recording the mistakes that are made and understanding what they mean.

Remember when you were a student and the teacher was lecturing about a topic and, for whatever reason, you zoned out? The middle school students in my science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) lab do not have this problem. The reason is that I “screen record” or “screen cast” all my lessons on videos that can be accessed online at any time.