Heather Wolpert-Gawron is an award-winning middle school teacher who was a California Regional Teacher of the Year in 2004. She is also a Writing Project Fellow at the University of California at Irvine and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. In addition to being a classroom teacher, she is also a contributor to Teacher Magazine and a staff blogger for The George Lucas Foundation’s Edutopia.org. Her articles have also appeared in Imagine Magazine. She is currently working on a book for tween teachers for EyeOnEducation Publishing and has just completed two workbooks of activities and lessons to help teach Internet Literacy for Teacher Created Materials. Wolpert-Gawron is dedicated to mentoring teachers and students alike. She blogs at www.tweenteacher.com.
Currently, Wolpert-Gawron teaches 7th and 8th Grade Language Arts as well as 7th/8th Speech & Debate/Podcasting. All of her classes are guided by an understanding of multiple-intelligences and differentiated instruction. Her Language Arts classes use a Writer’s Workshop format for all of their student collaboration and fluid group activities. Her Speech & Debate elective is a nationally ranked team that has also been groundbreaking in its use of technology in education. They create, write, perform, produce, and publicize an entire podcasting network. You can listen to their shows at iTunes, keyword: bulldogradio.
Blog Posts
I'm a teacher, a mother, a wife, and a blogger. I also just happen to be Jewish. I work in a Title I school in a Los Angeles community that is not home to many Jewish people. It's primarily a Latino and Asian community, with the students in my middle school knowing far more about Moshi than...
Read More.I think meaningful assessments can come in many shapes and sizes. It fact, to be thoroughly engaging and to draw the best work out of the students, assessments should come in different formats.
Read More.I see technology differentiation as vital to the education of our students. It's like there are different tiers of possibility.
Read More.Earlier in the year, I had our middle school Parent/Teacher conferences, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that 99 percent of my students (most of whom are Title I) have a computer in the home. However, there was absolutely no oversight of what was going on with the computer, because the...
Read More.A while back, I was asked, "What engages students?" Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10...
Read More.As some of my readers may know, I had an awakening of sorts this past summer: I am NOT going to teach so test driven, I told myself. I'm tired of the five-paragraph essay! Where does it exist anywhere but in school? Instead, I decided, that everything I did this school year would have...
Read More.Happy Digital Learning Day! As an educator, I have definitely evolved from tech tentative to tech tenacious in a very short period of time. Because of my recently found passion for educational technology, I want to share some of the scaffolds I've developed to help my students evolve into...
Read More.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...
Read More.I'm currently prepping my classes for another research unit, this one a blend of Memoir, Advocacy, and Speech Writing. After all, never in real life are genres categorized. They blend together; and the Common Core assessments to come recognize the desegregation of writing genres and the need...
Read More.I've been examining the Common Core Standards and the upcoming assessments lately in an attempt to tease apart this huge seismic shift that is about to go down. And while I think it will have its challenges, I have to admit that I like what I'm seeing. For one thing, they prioritize a more...
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