Angela Duckworth defines “grit” as the ability to persevere combined with an ability to pursue interests and passions over a long period of time to attain goals. She argues that this learnable quality is a predictor of success. More recently, her research has led to a focus on self-control as the underlying skill needed to become gritty. Check out her …
Collaborate With Anybody! As I was leaving my co-planning time today, I turned to my co-teacher and said something to the effect of “I love our co-planning period”. And I truly do, too. We are not only highly productive but we have transforming conversations that change the way we teach on a daily basis. The interesting thing is that we …
One of the main parts of a school interview is the practice lesson plan. It is a place where you can really show the interview team what you can do. For the interview team it is what they will remember most, so it is important to do it well. Below are 7 ideas for creating a lesson that will show …
Sample Lesson Plan In this sample lesson plan, a general activity is used to show how cooperative learning elements can be embedded to structure the lesson for improved productivity. Use any worksheet that requires answering questions or solving math problems. For the purposes of providing a specific example, imagine students have engaged in a mini lesson on graphing lines and …
Cooperative Learning Elements I cannot emphasize enough the importance of teaching kids to work in groups. There are several reasons that using groups is so important. Employers today want collaborators. They want people who can work with other people and be highly productive and efficient. If an employee doesn’t work well with others, they can easily be replaced with someone …
One of the most important skills great teachers possess is the ability to take risks. As a mentor to new teachers, I always encourage “no fear” teaching, with common sense of course. What I mean by that is teaching intuitively and being very careful not to avoid implementing innovative ideas for fear of, well, anything. We should never do anything …
There is quite a bit of recent research pointing to the idea that psychological interventions in learning environments can have a great impact on achievement. Eric Jensen summarizes some of this evidence in his article Your Students’ Number One Life Skill. While the idea of social emotional learning is complex, there are some easy ways to implement these ideas in …
Photo courtesy of thegoldguys.blogspot.com/ As an elementary school student, I attended a Montessori school and I remember playing with math manipulatives and talking about math. I had no idea if I was behind developmentally or not and I never thought about it either. When I began attending public school in third grade, I immediately knew my math skills were …
I don’t know about everyone else but we have a pervasive problem with students refusing to read on their own time. This causes a problem once they come back to class because they can’t participate and you can see how that spirals into some very unsuccessful lessons and makes it very difficult to do group work, a main theme in …
Every time I have a discussion about high stakes testing, it always ends with the same conclusion; there is very little wrong with student skills but they lack persistence. If they don’t read the passage then they will not be able to respond thoughtfully. If they don’t attempt a problem then they can’t possibly get it right. As much as …