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
It's hard to compartmentalize middle schoolers. I mean there's just so many levels, cliques, shapes, and sizes. It's almost as if each kid is their own species for this brief time in their lives, bubbling in this brew of tween-ness until they all settle down and come together one day as...
Read More.Social media and 21st century tools play important roles in educational advocacy. And as part of an unaffiliated group of 12 educators who began a relationship as bloggers and Facebook account holders, I soon discovered this to be quite true when we embarked on an online road to Washington DC in...
Read More.As a teacher and a new mom, it didn't take long for me to find Facebook as a supplement for my stunted social life. And as any FB user knows, once you join, you become inundated with photos of new babies, comments about friends' recent bodily...
Read More.I recently introduced Costa's Levels of Questioning to my students. We have some teachers at my school talking about these triggers of metacognition, so it compliments everyone's efforts to enter this discussion in the classroom.
Read More.I don't have a hook or a pithy anecdote to begin this post. I do, however, have the most important question I can think of in all its simplicity: How do we fix our schools?
Read More.So I've become a Guy Kawasaki fan. It all started when I was searching for commencement day speeches for the students on the speech and debate team to compete with.
Read More.Our goal here at Edutopia has always been to be place to come to as a first-stop resource and also as a place of support for educators.
Read More.Today's post is about the nomadic ebb and flow of school administrators. The media talks a lot about the importance of good teachers, and I have no qualms about agreeing with that necessity.
Read More.I'm really struggling with my feelings about tenure.
Read More.I've always been a multitasker. It frustrated my own teachers at times in that I always needed to be doing two things at once in order to be fully alert. My brain works like riding a bicycle: If I move too slowly, my attention span simply tips over.
Read More.
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