Student Engagement

A simple strategy encourages students to give their full attention when listening to others.

When educators at a Washington, DC, high school ditched their lectures and devised a self-paced blended learning model, their students thrived.

Most teachers use silencing methods, such as flicking the lights or ringing a call bell. This article explores some additional ideas categorized by grade bands.

In rural South Carolina, a Title I school makes the leap to become a Montessori school.

The year I started teaching seventh- to twelfth-grade English in Minneapolis, Prince launched his song about urban ruin, "Sign o' the Times." That song was an apt musical backdrop for the lives of my students, most of whom lived in poverty and challenged me daily. Fortunately, classroom order improved when I learned that successful classroom management depends on conscientiously executing a few big strategies and a lot of little ones.

We teachers are always looking to innovate, so, yes, it's essential that we try new things to add to our pedagogical bag of tricks. But it's important to focus on purpose and intentionality -- and not on quantity. So what really matters more than "always trying something new" is the reason behind why we do what we do.

When it comes to managing a classroom, new teachers mostly learn on the fly, but here are some ideas you can use right away.

Makerspaces build students’ cognitive abilities while fostering independence, perseverance, and self-regulation.

A quick pen-and-paper warm-up activity helps teachers see that students are on track in a self-paced blended learning classroom.

Brain breaks and focused-attention practices positively impact our emotional state, refocusing our neural circuitry to generate increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, where problem solving and emotional regulation occur.

Quick activities from DJ summaries to paper snowball fights can be used to check for understanding or emphasize key information at the end of a lesson.

Knowledge is a curse. Knowing things isn't bad itself, but it causes unhealthy assumptions -- such as forgetting how hard it was to learn those things in the first place. It's called the Curse of Knowledge. In this post, we'll identify how the Curse of Knowledge affects educators. Then we'll outline seven ways to alleviate the curse. The ultimate goal is to improve instruction.