Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #5: Find the Humor
Ever been told not to take something your classroom personally? That has never worked for me, ever. What has is finding the humor-- and more specifically having an acute sense of the ridiculous.
Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #3: Beg, Borrow, and Copy
Let's be real. Special education teachers almost never have all of the materials they need to excel. Bridging the gap requires always being on the lookout for what colleagues have--and being ready to beg, borrow, and copy what you need.
Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #2: The Power of Saying Hi
One of the keys to thriving as a special educator is having good relationships with the power players at your school-- the custodians and front office staff who can make your life so much better.... or not. This post is on how I learned that lesson and the power of saying hi.
Back in the Classroom
The goal of each of these ten activities is to structure whole class discussions in such a way that all students are included. Too often whole group discussions consist of one or two students talking and everyone else zoning out. The point of these activities is to equalize participation. Some, like the socratic seminar or debate are complex while others, like the silent discussion or stand up, sit down take no prep and can get inserted into many different types of activities. Take a look and let me know what you think-- did I forget any of your favorites?
How Do You Support Paraprofessionals?
How do you support paraprofessionals? Trainings? Meetings/check ins? Collaboration with general education teachers and paras?
10 Ways to Structure Whole Class Discussions to Get Broad Participation
The goal of each of these ten activities is to structure whole class discussions in such a way that all students are included. Too often whole group discussions consist of one or two students talking and everyone else zoning out. The point of these activities is to equalize participation. Some, like the socratic seminar or debate are complex while others, like the silent discussion or stand up, sit down take no prep and can get inserted into many different types of activities. Take a look and let me know what you think-- did I forget any of your favorites?
10 Strategies to Equitably Increase Student Engagement in Classroom Discussions
In an ideal classroom discussion, everyone participates. In many real discussions, only a few students participate. The challenge is, how do you get from the real to the ideal? The ten activities in this post are designed to bridge that gap!
10 Routines to Build Students’ Higher-Level Thinking Skills
Wouldn't it be nice if we had routines to build students’ thinking skills and habits of mind and not just routines to build their fluency and content knowledge? The ten activities here are (mostly!) super light-weight routines that can be woven into most activities to build students’ critical thinking skills without taking time away from the content you have to cover. Some are as simple as asking students follow up questions like, “Why do you think that?” Some are more complicated routines, like those teaching students how to ask good questions. Each however builds students’ conceptual understanding.
5 Ways to Structure Small Groups for Success
So when I started teaching at the college level, I got pretty obsessed with the idea that if I was going to teach folks how to teach, I needed to know something about how to teach. For some reason, that morphed into an obsession with learning all of the different ways to structure groups and activities within a classroom. While I don’t think my college students were quite as into trying out ALLLLLL of the activities I found as I had hoped, I did wind up with a cool round up of instructional activities. Today’s roundup has five different ways to structure small group activities. Note that I got all of these off of the internet years ago and all of these ideas belong to way cooler people than me so check out the embedded links!
5 Easy, End of Class Reviews to Check & Build Students’ Content Mastery
So you teach the most amazing class ever and then students leave. Done. But how do you know what they actually took away from the lesson or what questions they still have? How do you help cement what you taught in their brains so it doesn’t all slip away tomorrow? The five, fast and easy activities here all double as informal assessments of students’ learnings and strategies for helping students cement that learning.