Group items tagged

A simple and popular workaround for awkward or potentially unprofessional interactions is to use Facebook pages, groups or separate accounts in the classroom. Pages are essentially separate profiles that students can Like in order to receive updates, and you can add students to groups in order to stay connected. Creating a separate profile for yourself is an easy way to prevent students from seeing any personal information that you would normally have on Facebook.

When you set a social media policy for your classroom, it’s important to delineate clear guidelines with your students on how they should and should not interact with you.

“During the term, I perceive that friending a student creates uncomfortable boundaries for the student-professor relationship,” she says. “After all, students post information about their personal lives and vice versa.”

What if we, instead, proudly proclaim that we did things that we are embarrassed about and that’s okay

efrain might sustain the stigma that we want to end.

implicitly arguing this sort of behavior is best hidden

The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development

Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

"We already have a guitar. I can learn on my own and with my friends." Me: "It seems like you should get lessons for the basics." Her: "Mom, that's what the Internet is for." It turns out she's already been practicing with the help of YouTube tutorials.

because of the abundance of knowledge and social connections

balancing the competitive pressures of college-readiness, the need for unstructured learning and socializing, and the role of the Internet in all of that

Teachers expert in inspiring long-term, personally meaningful and interdisciplinary projects or thematic instruction regularly exceed the standards, but that realization is lost on facilitators.

New teachers have little or no experience with classroom centers, independent work, student projects and the sorts of agency that allow children to enjoy the “flow” experiences that build upon their obsessions and lead to understanding. Even when teachers are not lecturing from bell-to-bell, the classroom agenda is top-down and leaves little chance for serendipity or student initiative.

Great teachers know their students in deeper ways than any data can provide. They ask kids about their weekends. They chat about what kids are reading and console them when their hamster dies

students are leading their own reading. They want to practice their speed, accuracy, and comprehension. The iPod makes personal a process that has been painfully public. No struggling reader likes to have his or her weaknesses exposed in a group, in front of the entire class or their reading circle. The iPod enables more intimate, 1:1 reading instruction between a student and a teacher listening to each other's voices in audio files.

Success becomes contagious

"There's less of me talking and more of them doing."