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Topics in the News:
teaching issues and craft
Play is steadily disappearing from kindergarten, which can have negative consequences for children’s academic success. This was not the intent of the Common Core. High-quality Choice Time experiences contribute to the overall development of a child.
How do students acquire the literacy skills to succeed in life? Here is an approach one educator took.
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.
Telling the story of that epochal 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to public school students is a project of the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank supported by the American Federation of Teachers, which is creating a set of lesson plans on the occasion of the march’s 50th anniversary.
One of the biggest challenges that I have grappled with as an educator is how to help students write. Students can develop creative, reasoned and intellectually stimulating thoughts and responses to questions. However, they often lack the grammatical tools needed to best communicate their ideas.
Our union and our profession have been under attack in the last several years. We’re told we don’t work hard enough, that our results with our students are not great enough, that our profession and our schools need to be “reformed” for the sake of our children. But those who attack us do not understand teaching, and they do not understand just how hard our jobs are.
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.
After several days of listening to my 11th-grade students loudly voice their disinterest and confusion as we worked — or, more precisely, slogged — our way through Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” they were suddenly begging me to keep reading to them.
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.
The adoption of the Common Core Learning Standards provides social studies teachers with an opportunity to rethink day-to-day practices that have the potential to dramatically transform how students read, write and think about the subject.
The UFT recently surveyed members about how prepared they feel to teach to the new Common Core standards, and the responses came fast and furious. “Our survey offers a troubling portrait of a system on overload, with a workforce that fears for the educational well-being of students,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.
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.
Teachers now can share their best and brightest moments in the classroom with other teachers through a new AFT-sponsored online service called Share My Lesson, which has taken the practice not just national but global.
Human trafficking is a worldwide scourge, and even occurs here in the the United States. Understanding that and ending the practice was the mission of students and teachers at IS 229 in the Bronx on Nov. 14 as they joined Kenneth Morris, the great-great-great grandson of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass to promote a human trafficking curriculum for schools.
With the special education reform in full swing, many of us teachers — especially general education teachers — will find ourselves teaching students with disabilities and possibly collaborating with special education teachers.
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.
A high-level gubernatorial commission on education reform on Oct. 16 got a rapid-fire earful from UFT President Michael Mulgrew, who warned that most teachers still do not have the curricula to prepare students for new state assessments this year that will incorporate challenging Common Core Learning Standards.
Soon 12th-grade students will be taking the first of many steps into adulthood. Preparing students for this next step involves more than just academic readiness; it also requires maturity. So how can teachers motivate students to understand and accomplish the goals needed to achieve graduation and transition into college? It starts with a plan.
The research has been out there for years: Students’ course grades are far better predictors of high school and college performance than standardized test scores, even SAT scores. A grade reflects the less measurable qualities: work habits, motivation, social and emotional intelligence, and perseverance in the face of failure.
The Speak Truth to Power competition gets students in grades 6-12 into the action by showing them, through their teachers, how to make a three- to six-minute human rights video, with the top-winning video to be shown at the festival on April 29.
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