Great Educational Resources

Any teacher or parent of adolescents will tell you, kids love to argue! With some effort, you can harness this natural inclination in your classroom as a way to improve your students’ content knowledge and literacy abilities.

Two of the targeted initiatives in the Common Core standards are a focus on developing students’ speaking and listening skills and a focus on developing students’ abilities to support claims with evidence. Debating is a way to address both of these concepts in a fun and engaging way.

Jitters. Hope. Excitement. Fear. Optimism. Most veteran teachers still share some of these feelings on the first day school. But, for first-year teachers, these feelings are multiplied exponentially.

We ALL were first-year teachers and lived through our first day of school and the first year. But wouldn’t it have been nice if a group of experienced educators – with all due respect to college professors - sat you down before your first year of teaching and said, “This is what is really important. This is what you really need to know.

I used to think that if I taught my students to read a poem critically or to question ideas in class discussion, that I was giving them the tools that they needed to take on the manipulative and possibly malicious media that they would come across in their lives. But now I know that I wasn't doing enough.

We’re increasingly relying on technology to teach children. But because technology won’t ever replace great teaching, basic educational aids still have a role to play.

This is because educational aids (such as books, toys or equipment that require some hands-on interaction) create a visual, auditory or interactive experience for children who are learning new things, delivering learning objectives in a way that is highly engaging.

As a social studies teacher in the Common Core era, my curricular responsibilities have gradually shifted away from historical material and more towards the realm of teaching strategies for reading and creating nonfiction text. More and more, teaching the skills required to engage with social studies content has usurped the push to memorize names, dates, locations, and stories.

Communication is without a doubt an important 21st-century skill. Likewise, there is no doubt that students of today have more information at their fingertips than at any time in history. But the challenge for teachers is in helping students to effectively convey all of that information when they communicate their ideas. One of the best ways to do this is by focusing on citation.