The Buzz of Teaching

Questions Sometimes I see other staff members in the building who need recognize that they are good at what they do, but I don't feel it's my place to address them about that subject. Sometimes I see other staff members in the building who need to recognize that they are not as good at what they do, and that doesn't mean they're a terrible teacher, but things can be improved. I am 100% not in a place to address this with them. How can we celebrate success more in our staff meetings, because those are devolving into negative time traps. I get told that my classroom, my curriculum, and my style of teaching are amazing, yet when we look at STAR data (which is the only data that counts, next to MCA tests) my students are not improving. What.  I have high efficacy. Real high efficacy.  We should invite the principal in to observe our room (which I enjoy) but many others only see that type of a visit as a negative thing. I definitely don't take compliments well (...

When speaking with my SAGA group about the feedback we are given on our blogs, we all talked about how we like being asked to look at others' blogs because it gives us the opportunity to see different ideas across all grade levels. Even though our content will look different, the core concepts behind our strategies do apply across curriculum and grade levels. When it comes to feedback, we also talked about it can be stressful to receive many Coaching Questions on the same post, because we feel the need to respond immediately. So as a SAGA group, we talked about spreading out our questions so we didn't bombard one person each week. One thing I've noticed on my posts, is that sometimes we're so focused on doing the right thing in a comment (like asking several coaching questions to show that we are trying to improve this skill) that in the rush of reading, brainstorming, and posting the question sometimes the core aspect of my blog post will be missed. For example, I...

Photo Credit: Vecteezy.com The second trimester of my AP Language and Composition class focuses on the art of synthesizing a claim based on information from multiple sources. Because of this overarching goal, I've implemented several trimester-long projects, one of them being Socratic Seminars. Here's how they work in my classroom: Students are in charge of finding an article from a reputable source published within the past year, creating 6 higher order discussion questions, moderating the seminar, and kicking off the discussion with a quick, energizing activity. Students self-selected their groups and we have a Socratic Seminar every Monday. Students LOVE this. To help spread the wealth, I use Socratic SemiCARDS to encourage each classmate to add to the conversation. All of the RED cards need to be played first before students move on to YELLOW. Their goal is to have 100% of the class play their GREEN card. If they do, everyone get's 100%! This activity is ...

Post-Its are pretty high on the list of supplies we order at the end of the year. For a long time I've just thought of them to be used as quick Exit Tickets, or ways to post students' thoughts, or for students' to vote during an activity, but this week I decided to use them in conjunction with a very simple Body Biography assignment. Students read Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924) and used it as an anchor text to review larger skills like Claim-Support and Compare / Contrast Writing Styles. I asked students to write an extremely detailed, super-sized Claim-Support paragraph, and I didn't want to overload them with writing, so I decided to use a common assignment - a Body Biography - as a part Graphic Organizer, part Summarization activity. On the front of the Body Biography, I included the directions, objective, and an example of what I was asking students to do. On the back was the outline of a cartoon person. I opened my desk drawer ...