Just Another Fad?

In today's world of education, we talk a lot about things like collaboration, collective teacher efficacy, student self-assessment, feedback and much more as a part of effective educational practice, but when you have been in education for many years, as I have, many "effective educational practices" have proven not to be as effective as we once thought. How do we know that what we are doing today is not just another "fad" that will go away only to be replaced by the next one? How can we be confident that the things we are doing today will last and that…

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Using Technology the Right Way

Laptops and other tools of technology can provide an excellent way to deliver instruction to students, but with an almost umlimited base of information available through the internet, how do we make sure students are getting the things that we want them to get? Student engagement almost always increaases when students use technology to frame answers to the big questions we give them but that engagement must be productive and lead to the learning objectives that we want them to know. So, how can we direct learning in a way that will make use of the tools of technology and…

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Wait for It!

As teachers, we ask a lot of questions, but do we question effectively? Do we often direct questions to the entire group with responses coming from everywhere? Do we solicit answers from all of our students randomly or do we select students we think are likely to know the answers? Are our questions carefully selected to match the standards we are teaching and do our questions lead to deeper thought processes from our students? Most importantly, do we wait, really wait, for students to answer? The way we do questioning as well as how we handle students' answers are an…

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Practical Application of Guiding Questions

We have divided our course into units and have created guiding questions after carefully unpacking standards that our students need to know. We have collaborated with our colleagues to refine our guiding questions and have posted them for our students to see. Now what do we do with them? Guiding questions not only drive excellent instruction but assist in lesson planning as well as student assessment. Guiding questions are central to daily, focused instruction and evaluation.I am often surprised when I see a guiding question posted in a classroom, especially in a subject with unfamiliar content, and when I ask…

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