Note from Dave: Erica Beaton teaches tenth grade English, US history, and humanities just down the hall from me. In addition to this full-time work, she’s also a blogger, a PD provider (who I’m happy to recommend — we’ve presented together a time or two!) and one of the more resourceful educators I know, creating helpful things like a highly-effective Latin word chunk […]
Guest Posts
Myth: If We Supervise and Evaluate Teachers More Intensely, the Quality of Teaching Will Improve
Note from Dave: I first became aware of Dr. Richard DuFour when I moved to Cedar Springs and experienced professional learning communities (PLCs) for the first time. When I was approached about hosting a guest article from Dr. DuFour, I was eager to read what he had to say after a decorated career as a leader in education. […]
5 Steps to Argumentalizing Instruction
Note from Dave: I met Les Lynn through an author-thinker-teacher hero of mine, Dr. Jerry Graff. In one of those rare, surreal, “out of body experience” moments that this blog has blessed me with, I once found myself having a drink with none other than the author of the seminal Clueless in Academe and co-author (with Cathy Birkenstein) […]
Mechanics Instruction that Sticks: Using Simple Warm-Ups to Improve Student Writing
English teachers are, in my humble opinion, the hardest working people in public education. We have the unenviable task of trying to convince a generation of kids raised on electronic devices and nursed by spell check to slow down and write with purpose and precision. We see ourselves as the last line of defense against the continual erosion of the language, and we try to teach our kids to avoid all of the dreaded errors – the run-on, the forgotten apostrophe, the misplaced modifier – that threaten to reduce our language into an incomprehensible stew of unpunctuated gibberish filled with text-friendly abbreviations and inscrutable emojis. We admire our content-teaching colleagues, but we secretly envy their ability to simply ignore the numerous errors that litter essay responses as they grade for ideas and content knowledge.
No More Painful Research
Note from Dave: A few months ago, my friend Deborah Owen of EinsteinsSecret.net approached me with an idea for a guest post on an approach to research that seemed pretty… well, non-freaked out. I immediately loved the idea of having Deborah share this approach to research with the Teaching the Core community because it’s a Common Core […]