Stay up-to-date with the AdLit’s professional development webcast series — for staff workshops, professional learning communities, or to watch on your own.
Similar to expert craftsmen teaching their trades to apprentices, teachers can model thinking and problem-solving skills to their students. Read more about various classroom modeling techniques.
As part of their series to help schools understand the federal No Child Left Behind Law, Learning Point Associates describes the four key elements of student engagement — student confidence, teacher involvement, relevant texts, and choice among texts and assigments.
Every school should do an initial screening to check on student reading skills at the beginning of each semester or school year. And every teacher should continue to check on students’ progress throughout the year, in order to see whether those kids need more ongoing support.
College readiness is a multi-faceted concept that includes factors both internal and external to the school environment. The model presented here emerges from a review of the literature and includes the skills and knowledge that can be most directly influenced by schools.
Too often, teachers say that the professional development they receive provides limited application to their everyday world of teaching and learning. Here The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory shares a five-phase framework that can help create comprehensive, ongoing, and — most importantly — meaningful professional development.
A Brown Bag Exam uses found objects and images to help students activate prior knowledge and creates a framework for students to express their understanding. Students work individually and in collaboration to create concrete connections between the reading and the Brown Bag items. Unlike traditional assessment, the Brown Bag Exam is an exam filled with conversation, idea exchange, and learning.
Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This article suggests several personalized ways to hold students accountable for their reading.
We’ve added three new book reviewers for the summer — Nick (10th grade), Graham (7th), and Breece (4th), are sharing their summer reading choices each week and telling us exactly what they think.
“Solution Shop” is a counseling and study skills program designed to address the academic needs of struggling middle school students. In this program, the school counselor serves the critical role of developing and providing appropriate interventions, which range from individual and group counseling, study skills instruction, parent consultation, behavioral contracts, math and reading tutoring, and teacher meetings.
Writing is a complex operation requiring knowledge of text structure, syntax, vocabulary, and topic, and sensitivity to audience needs; so it is not surprising that many teens find writing challenging. This article identifies the qualities of strong writing instruction, and offers advice to teachers for incorporating writing instruction into their practice, using tools like notebooks and journals, and sharing strategies that reinforce the importance of pre-writing and revision.
Being able to speak English fluently does not guarantee that a student will be able to use language effectively in academic settings. Fluency must be combined with higher order thinking skills to create an “academic language,” which allows students to effectively present their ideas in a way that others will take seriously. The author, an ELL teacher, describes her use of “protocols” (a cheat sheet of sentence starters) to build students’ cognitive academic language proficiency.
Teachers are often asked to modify instruction to accommodate special needs students. In fact, all students will benefit from the following good teaching practices. The following article takes the mystery out of adapting materials and strategies for curriculum areas.
Literacy practices interviews are informal assessments that elicit information on students’ reading and writing activities, including their free-time reading habits, their access to books, and their attitudes toward reading and writing. Use the interviews in one-on-one or small, focus group-like settings.
Progress monitoring is an assessment technique that tells teachers how and when to adjust curriculum so that students meet benchmark goals by the end of the year. This research shows that progress monitoring is an effective way to set and meet academic goals.
Students may be struggling with word study, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension — or even motivation. It’s key to figure out where students are with their literacy skills, what kinds of support they need, and to see them as individuals.
Recent research shows that some high schools have much lower dropout rates than would be predicted based on the composition of their student bodies. Moreover, requiring students to work harder and complete a tougher academic curriculum might actually improve graduation rates rather than making them plummet, as so many educators fear.
University of Virginia Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning
The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and social development. Each dimension falls into one of three board categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.
