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Differentiating content includes using various delivery formats such as video, readings, lectures, or audio. Content may be chunked, shared through graphic organizers, addressed through jigsaw groups, or used to provide different techniques for solving equations.

Process is how students make sense of the content. They need time to reflect and digest the learning activities before moving on to the next segment of a lesson.

Processing helps students assess what they do and don't understand. It's also a formative assessment opportunity for teachers to monitor students' progress.

Project-based learning (PBL) naturally lends itself to differentiated instruction. By design, it is student-centered, student-driven, and gives space for teachers to meet the needs of students in a variety of ways. PBL can allow for effective differentiation in assessment as well as daily management and instruction.

Not all students may need the mini-lesson, so you can offer or demand it for the students who will really benefit.

Are you differentiating for academic ability? Are you differentiating for collaboration skills? Are you differentiating for social-emotional purposes? Are you differentiating for passions?

a key readiness factor: knowing how to learn.

If you believe in what you're doing," he adds, "working out your problems is the only option."

Resilience turns out to be another key readiness factor for tackling hard problems.

There are many dimensions of student achievement that we need to evaluate in PBL. The end product is certainly important, but if we focus only on that, the meaningful learning that happens throughout the process can be lost as students feel pressure to do whatever it takes to "make the grade."

In other words, we want to acknowledge not only what they learned, but how they came to learn it so that they can use these processes in the future.

Establish target goals early to provide purpose for the project, while also establishing expectations of the result: What is the problem to solve or the product to create? What kinds of subject area content need to be included or addressed in the project? What expectations do you have for the final product's presentation, publishing, or performance? What kinds of collaborative behaviors must be demonstrated by students throughout the process? Feedback and corrections should happen frequently to keep students on track, improve their work, and set them up for success in the final product. Waiting too long to give feedback may result in work that is too far gone to be fixed or improved.

#1) Use a normal, natural voice

#2) Speak only when students are quiet and ready

#3) Use hand signals and other non-verbal communication

Understanding YouTube and Digital Citizenship (6): YouTube’s online curriculum for secondary students is a perfect resource for Digital Citizenship Week. Teachers will find ten lessons, all of which take between 20-50 minutes to teach, and they cover extremely relevant topics like managing online reputation and protecting privacy online.

Digital Citizenship Learning Center from CyberWise (7): CyberWise produced an extensive list of digital citizenship resources, including videos, games and toolkits from a variety of sources.

Today's classrooms are notorious for handing students the basic skills to live in the world while denying them the strength of character to transform it.

By shifting the focus of our feedback to effort as opposed to outcome, we leave students with the feeling that their best is yet to come.

Duckworth’s research is heir to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck (2) on mindsets. Believing that we can succeed even after suffering repeated setbacks (what Dweck calls a "growth mindset") can actually re-wire our brains -- and rewrite our fortunes.

In Age of Distraction: Why It's Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus (1), Katrina Schwartz refers to studies showing that the ability to focus on a task has been linked to future success. She quotes psychologist and author Daniel Goleman as saying, "This ability [to focus] is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health."

In a similar article, With Tech Tools, How Should Teachers Tackle Multitasking in Class? (2), author Holly Korbey explores research around student study habits and talks to veteran teachers about their experiences with students using technology in the classroom.

Instead, we should be deliberately teaching students how to manage their attention with their devices.

"We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience."

Reflection not only makes learning stick at the end of a project but also helps students think about what's working well and what's not during PBL.

The same holds true for teachers.

academic rigor, with its unflinching emphasis on measurable success, seems strangely at odds with emotional intelligence, a soufflé of moods and feelings.

Designed around cooperative learning, your lesson plan can actively foster class-wide feelings of cohesiveness, collaboration and interdependence -- without sacrificing instructional time or learning goals.

In cooperative learning, students work together, think together and plan together using a variety of group structures designed along an instructional path.