5 Ways to Give Your Students More Voice and Choice

The idea of co-constructing knowledge with students can be a scary thing for many of us teachers. The age-old role of teacher as orator, director, sage has been handed down for centuries and most of us grew up as students looking to teachers in this way. It's hard to shake. Co-constructing knowledge means giving up the myself and them role of teacher and students and fully embracing the wonder and journey of us. The first step we have to take is becoming familiar and comfortable with saying "I don't know" out loud to our students. Maybe that sounds silly, but it's a huge step for many of us. We all just sat there in the silence of those three words. Then I said, "Who knows something about this that they can share?" Two educational theorists who inform my thinking about co-constructing knowledge are Vygotsky and Freire. Yes, it is true that teachers need to be the ultimate decision-makers about a lot of things. In The Classroom #1) Stuff We Want to Know About #2) Task Force Teams of Inquiry

Home Page | Student Success Skills 9 Big Ideas within the Speaking and Listening Anchor Standards Every day or so, someone finds this website through searching some variation of “big ideas in the Common Core Speaking and Listening standards.” The problem is, an answer to that question isn’t currently easy to find on Teaching the Core! In order to try providing a better resource for that search, as well as for the sake of increasing my own understanding, here are 9 big ideas that I draw from the CCSS Speaking and Listening anchor standards. First of all, I’d like to share my insanely complex methods for creating this post. Intense, right? Now to the big ideas. I love that we’re talking about the Speaking and Listening standards rather than just the speaking standards. It is absolutely freaking certain that, if you don’t know how to listen, you don’t really know how to speak and you are not optimally prepared for college or career. If you’ve been doing think-pair-share in your classes, you’ve got this covered. Hold debates. Keyword: productive. Okay, that video might be irrelevant.

25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area 25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area Reading is reading. By understanding that letters make sounds, we can blend those sounds together to make whole sounds that symbolize meaning we can all exchange with one another. Without getting too Platonic about it all, reading doesn’t change simply because you’re reading a text from another content area. Science content can often by full of jargon, research citations, and odd text features. Social Studies content can be an interesting mix of itemized information, and traditional paragraphs/imagery. Literature? This all makes reading strategies somewhat content area specific. But if you’d like to start with a basic set of strategies, you could do worse than the elegant graphic above from wiki-teacher.com. For related reading, see 50 of the best reading comprehension apps, different ways your school can promote literacy, or how reading in the 21st century is different. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. To the above list, we’d add: