Education Articles for Teachers & Educators

Think about a lesson where every student in your class is responsible for one piece of the content, and no one will be able to understand the content fully unless they all work together and learn from each other. Consider one student group who have studied the causes of an event, another has studied the key figures responsible for the event, and a third has studied the consequences of that event. When these students regroup, each student becomes the source of information that they then share with their peers. To understand the entire concept for the lesson, every student has to teach one piece, and every student has to listen to the others. This is the foundation of a popular cooperative learning strategy in education: the jigsaw method. Jigsaw strategies break a topic into parts, make each student an expert in one part, and then rely on students to teach one another until the full concept comes together. But, in order for it to be actually effective and promote learning, you must consider a specific structure and planning process when implementing this into your classroom.

Imagine a first-grade teacher finishing a week of high-frequency word instruction. Her students had practiced the week's ten words every day, chanting them at morning meeting, tracing them on whiteboards, sorting them into a pocket chart, and nearly every child passed Friday's quiz. Then, on Monday, as she worked in a small group of students, she noticed a student who stopped at the word "said". He looked at the page, tried "sad" and "sat," and then just skipped it altogether. He got the word right last week on his quiz! The teacher's first instinct is reasonable on the outside: "he just needs more repetition and more time memorizing this word!" But the trouble she is missing is that he hasn't actually practiced decoding the word to help move the word into storage. Pure memorization alone, this teacher quickly realizes, is not the way to ensure students master sight words. This article discusses how high-frequency words become sight words, and why explicit attention to letter-sound structure is what really helps students master sight words. You'll leave this article with an understanding that sight word practice can be a necessary component of reading practice, but as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, the strong reading instruction you are doing in your classroom.

Think back to your own childhood as a student in school. Do you recall going on any field trips? Maybe you toured an art museum and can still picture your favorite work. Perhaps you went to a zoo or aquarium and learned about an animal you never knew existed. Maybe you watched a play or a musical performance that sparked a lasting interest in the arts. Field trips give students the chance to experience things they might not otherwise encounter in their daily lives, and they can have a lasting impact on a child's education. Read More.

You have likely used, or seen, teachers transform and improve behaviors using a simple sticker chart as a rewards system. You might have also seen how a student’s behavior improves after you focus on providing consistent and specific praise. Positive and negative behaviors in your classroom don’t typically come out of nowhere, and much of what your students do is actually shaped by what happens before they do it and whether the behavior is followed by something like a reward, a consequence, or a specific action. One well-studied framework for understanding student behaviors comes from B.F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which describes how what comes after the behavior is what makes that behavior more or less likely to happen. In this article, you will learn about operant conditioning and why it can be beneficial to understand in your classroom.

Instructional strategies are research-based methods that teachers use to deliver content to students and improve their instructional practice. But it also goes further than that, because by combining classroom management strategies, assessment strategies, and other brain-based and memory-based strategies to support students, they all work together to improve the classroom and increase learning. This article serves as a resource to understand how strong instructional and other teaching strategies translate to student success in your classroom. (Read more)

As a teacher plans a reading unit for her upcoming class, she decides to increase the rigor of her planned lesson activities. Since the text she chose contains many unfamiliar words, students are tasked with reading a passage, listing the unfamiliar words, and defining them using their dictionaries. She decides that instead of requiring students to choose five words to define, she will require students to define ten words this time. (Read more)

You can earn graduate-level credits for your Massachusetts lane change, adding thousands of dollars to your salary each year. This article will provide you with some examples of lane changes and help you think about the lowest cost path to accumulate your credits and increase your salary.

Think about this familiar scene. In a kindergarten classroom, it is time to clean up an art activity and move to the carpet for reading time. You give the instructions for cleaning up, and most of your class starts putting materials away. One student does not; instead, she stays at her table, continuing to color and play with her materials. When you ask her to put her materials away and join the group, she says no and turns away. You repeat the direction more firmly, then walk over to her and ask her to join the group. Many teachers in this situation might continue to restate the expectations and become frustrated if one student is not able to listen. Even when classroom norms and rules are well implemented, some children will not comply for various reasons. Instead of struggling with compliance, teachers can add another approach for those students who need additional help. Called behavioral momentum, a teacher instead asks students to do smaller, easier-to-complete tasks that lead up to the main, more challenging tasks. (Read more)

Imagine a middle school teacher finishes a unit on East Asia. Students had been working on identifying and locating physical and geographic features on a map, like landforms, bodies of water, and urban centers, as well as identifying the location of countries around the world. In this unit, the teacher described the region’s monsoon climate, and students learned why its rivers support a denser population than in other areas. While students are engaged in the content throughout the unit and analyze a map of the region as they discuss its features, they have a hard time identifying geographic features on their own. For example, when the teacher projects a blank map onto the board and asks students to identify the Yellow Sea or label countries like China, Japan, and North and South Korea, many students are unable to do so, even though they discussed these areas in class extensively. (Read More)

We all know the Think-Pair-Share! It’s a common student collaboration strategy that is seemingly ubiquitous across classrooms. But it has been around long enough that many teachers will treat it as routine to incorporate into the classroom, rather than thinking more deeply about it as a true learning strategy. (read more)

In this Model Teaching Spotlight webinar, you will explore Think-Pair-Share as a research-backed collaborative learning model and learn how to implement it effectively in any classroom. You will consider some elements that determine whether a collaboration activity produces strong learning, evaluate the kind of prompts you might build to promote higher-order thinking and peer discourse, and consider how you might use the think-pair-share collaborative structure to engage your students.

You can earn thousands of dollars in increased salary through a lane change in Pennsylvania by earning graduate-level credits! This article will provide you with some examples of lane changes and how they work across different district types to advance your salary.