Blogs on Lesson Plans

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Todd FinleyMarch 27, 2012

Did you check out Open Education Week this month? The international event highlighted free lesson plans and materials, searchable by subject, grade and quality. I spent a couple days throwing keywords into OER (open education resources are digital materials freely available through open licenses) search engines to assess the quality of secondary and higher education writing curricula.

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Danielle Moss LeeMarch 14, 2012

Late one afternoon last week, I found a student smiling a smile of sheer relief at the Harlem Educational Activities Fund (HEAF). "Only 40 days left," she grinned. She was meticulously counting down the days to the end of the school year.

I smiled to myself. As much as I enjoyed the years I spent teaching in New York City, I have to admit that I, too, hit The Wall around this time of year. Sometimes it takes nothing less than sheer will and determination to make it through.

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Matt HurstFebruary 17, 2012

Have you ever had a class where only a small portion of the children ask questions or make comments? Do you end up calling on the same students multiple times during the course of your class? One challenge teachers face is requiring and enabling every student an equal opportunity to ask and respond to questions during class.

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Adora SvitakFebruary 8, 2012

What's the most powerful resource in your classroom? Is it the formidable stack of textbooks, the encyclopedia, the computer? As much of a reader and education technology enthusiast as I am, I believe this most powerful resource is something else entirely.

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Lisa Michelle DabbsJanuary 24, 2012

Welcome to week two of Edutopia's New Teacher Academy blog series! I'm excited to be here with you sharing my passion to support and mentor new teachers. I hope that you will stay with us as we continue to look at five key topics designed to provide resources for new teachers in five key areas. To collaborate in more detail on these and other topics, I invite you to join my weekly New Teacher chat on Twitter, and also to visit my blog Teaching with Soul.

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Andrew MillerJanuary 18, 2012

Rubrics are a beast. Grrrrrrr! They are time-consuming to construct, challenging to write and sometimes hard to use effectively. They are everywhere. There are rubrics all over the web, plus tools to create them, and as educators, it can overwhelm us. Rubrics are driven by reforms, from standards-based grading to assessment for learning. With so many competing purposes, it only makes sense that rubrics remain a beast to create and to use. Here are some (only some) tips for designing and using effective rubrics. Regardless of the reforms and structures you have in place, these can be used by all educators.

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Elena AguilarJanuary 18, 2012

"My mom is a hero," Alfredo said, cutting me off one sentence into a picture book about Martin Luther King, Jr. His chubby second-grade body perpetually squirmed on the rug where my 32 students were seated. "She brought us here from El Salvador by herself. Me, my two sisters, and our baby brother. We walked."

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Heather Wolpert-GawronDecember 19, 2011

As many of my readers know, my classes are currently mimicking a TED conference by writing Advocacy/Memoir speeches of their own as a means to learn a more real-world version persuasive writing. That is, they are studying the structure of many of the TED speeches online

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Trisha RicheDecember 14, 2011

Here's an experiment you can conduct in many schools, maybe even the school where you teach. Look through the door of one classroom and you might see the students hunched over, not engaged, even frowning. The teacher looks frazzled, tired and wishing he or she were somewhere else. You might think, "Well, everyone has a bad day." But you might witness this scenario in this teacher's classroom no matter what day you look through the door. For the second part of the experiment, look through the door of another classroom, and you might see a room full of lively students, eager, engaged and participating. The teacher is full of energy and smiling. This happens no matter what day you look through that door.

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Marisa KaplanDecember 13, 2011

Quiz of the Day: What does the "Special" in Special Education mean?

A. That every child learns in a special way?
B. That every teacher teaches in a special way?
C. That a teacher specializes in educating all kinds of learners?

Actually it's
D. All of the above

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