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A teacher website with vocabulary games and unit design resources

"Educator Mia MacMeekin has put together a clear infographic highlighting some of the ways teachers design "personalized" curriculum."

"A year ago, we were approached by The Princeton Review to help them design a survey about Student Life in America. Rather than focusing on academic performance, they wanted to understand students' academic process. What goes through their heads when they do homework? Where do they turn for help when they're stuck? How do they think and feel during a typical school day? In short, the survey was designed to find out what only students can know: their thoughts, feelings, and goals. The results suggest that if we want to fix education, then we have to move away from blaming teachers, resources, or classroom size, and start talking seriously about what students are doing to create academic success -- and how we can best support them in that process. Here are some of the survey's most telling results."

"The Gallup Student Poll is an online poll made up of 20 well-researched questions designed to assess the hope, engagement, and wellbeing of students in the U.S. The poll takes eight to ten minutes to complete, and is entirely free to any public or private school in the United States. After your students complete the poll, you will receive a detailed report on the engagement level at your school. This report can be monumental in discovering elements of your school community that can be improved upon to increase student engagement. The act of administering the Gallup Student Poll, or any poll designed to research student engagement, is also an excellent opportunity to connect with your students. Explain to them why you're asking them to complete the poll and let them know that their school cares about their wellbeing. Reassure your students that you are listening to their feedback and that the results will be studied carefully and acted upon. Once you have a good idea of how engaged your students are, you can start to create activities and programs to increase their engagement."

Some interesting ideas here on designing rubrics and assessments based on standards

"These publications are the real deal - online and print periodicals that showcase work by student artists and writers, some as young as age five. Many are run by a staff that is partly or completely made up of students. Each one is beautifully designed and features high-quality work. Some even pay. If you know a student who aspires to become a serious writer or artist, encourage them to take the next step and start working toward publication."

"Inspired by the success of our popular syndicated series Poem-a-Day, we're pleased to present Teach This Poem.  Produced for K-12 educators, Teach This Poem features one poem a week from our online poetry collection, accompanied by interdisciplinary resources and activities designed to help teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom. "

"Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. Michael Collins selected these poems with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and he suggests that all members of the school community be included as readers. A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily announcements over the public address system.

"Two years ago, at the suggestion of a fellow actor, Kelly decided to take a different tack: Incorporate music, specifically hip-hop, into a typical workshop. He pulled apart one of his traditional presentations featuring Shakespearean speeches from different plays, and revamped it with hip-hop beats and music. They focused on the rhythm and poetry of both art forms, and even designed a rap version of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, comparing it with the themes of some present-day hip-hop songs. "We will say [to the students], 'Oh, isn't that interesting? 400 years ago this guy was talking about this [suicide, indecision], so really, nothing has changed, has it?" When they brought it to high schools, "Shakespeare Meets Hip-Hop" was an instant success. "The presentation itself, they loved," Kelly said. "They'd go bananas when we would do it, and they loved all the musical stuff we put in there.""

" I finally took my first tangible steps toward exploring teacher autonomy by applying for an Ignition Grant to attend the Teacher-Powered Schools National Conference in Los Angeles in late January. The grant is for teacher groups who are interested in learning more about the teacher-powered model, which is defined as schools or programs in which teachers have the autonomy to make design and implementation decisions. Long story short: We received the grant and found ourselves immersed in a small sea of like-minded educators-educators who not only envision an educational approach more effective for their students, but have the courage, the heart, and the wisdom to make it a reality. Here are my top five takeaways from the conference."

"During the school year, students are expected to listen to and absorb vast amounts of content. But how much time has been devoted to equipping students with ways to disconnect from their own internal dialogue (self-talk) and to focus their attention fully on academic content that is being presented? Learning to listen well is a prime example of a skill that many assume shouldn't need to be taught. The Common Core State Standards for Language Arts recognize the importance of listening as an ability that students must master to become college and career ready. Listening is a crucial aspect of school and life, but it is often expected of students without ever being taught. The HEAR strategy described below is designed to help students recognize and block out that noise as they devote their attention to listening."

"Out of Eden Learn is a unique online learning community designed to accompany Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk. Through Out of Eden Learn, students from around the world can engage in Paul's journey and all that it represents. They explore their own neighborhoods, investigate contemporary global issues, and reflect on how they as individuals fit into a broader geographical and historical context. In addition, they share their perspectives and interact with one another on an exciting digital platform that uses social media as a springboard for deep, meaningful learning. The goal is to ignite students' interest in the wider world and support them to become more informed, thoughtful, and engaged "global citizens.""

"Project Ed is a platform dedicated to educational video made for and by 21st century learners. The core of Project Ed is an open, community-driven approach to content. We start by identifying K-12 concepts where a video has the potential to create a meaningful impact.Then we design contests to take these lessons out of the classroom and put them in the hands of digital storytellers. Each contest starts with a "creative brief," that includes everything needed to achieve a specific learning goal. Once the brief is launched on Projected.com, creators from all over craft original narratives to teach in unforgettable ways. Each brief generates hundreds of new ideas and a multitude of submissions. This process brings together the rigor of curriculum experts and the passion of creators to build an open library of effective, engaging lessons."

"I had tried everything from the traditional book report style assessment to more creative movie trailers, but I didn't feel like they accomplished what I wanted from a silent sustained reading assessment. It wasn't until I went to a book club meeting with some friends that inspiration struck. At our book club meetings we ate food, drank wine, and talked about literature for hours. Why couldn't our SSR assessment be more like that? (Sans the wine, of course.) I thought about what inspired me to read my book club books and the answer was that I really enjoyed that evening of food, conversation, and friends. So, I decided to design a book club style chat assessment for our silent sustained reading. The goal was to get my students having conversations about their various books. Ultimately, I hoped they would turn each other on to titles they had read and enjoyed. Below is a brief overview of the assignment. I've also included a link to a Google document with a detailed explanation of the assignment for any teacher interested in using it!"

"In this lesson, students consider the purpose and history of Op-Eds by exploring the Times feature celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Op-Ed page. They then do one of several multidisciplinary activities designed to make Op-Eds relevant to their experience, perspective and learning."

"Helping students fail isn't just a matter of making them feel better-it's about thinking like a scientist, farmer, designer, or CEO-failing gives me the data I need to proceed. And knowledge? Those letter grades don't mean much. An A doesn't guarantee understanding, and an F doesn't preclude it. To "fail" could mean a thousand things-which is exactly why students need help to understand it. The Role Of Failure In Learning Properly understood, failure can help students see learning as a personal journey rather than a matter of external performance. It emphasizes meaning as contextual, and distinguishes procedural knowledge from content knowledge. The primary value, then, might be in teaching students learning and knowledge rather than responsibility."

"Morone, with the backing of the high school district's administration, has developed an "open classroom" curriculum for all of the sophomore honors English students where students are given independence to demonstrate they have mastered the same standards the school has been using for years. "We are using the same core texts, the same curriculum designed by the school and approved by the board of education - but the way we are approaching the curriculum is very different," Morone said. "The first word that has to be put out there about it is that it is non-linear." Dr. Barry Bachenheimer, the regional director of curriculum in the district, said Morone's class is part of a "larger idea" of allowing flexibility to foster learning in the Pascack Valley High School District - which includes the "Pascack Period," a weekly 88-minute period where students can study, work out or sign up for non-traditional classes taught by teachers and even students. "

"The important lesson from our study is that quality matters -- that in many situations it would be better to place more emphasis on the design and use of the assignments than on the number or size of them." In a collaboration between the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the study's authors gathered with the help of colleagues a list of 27 writing practices that are said to be effective. "

"Was I teaching argumentation to empower my students? Of course. But by teaching them to focus on finding evidence to support claims, I was achieving the opposite effect. I was making them susceptible to an epidemic of our time: the tendency to select facts that support a certain perception of reality, rather than discerning what reality is by analyzing observations and facts. With this in mind, I shifted my focus to the work that needs to happen before one makes an argument-the work of looking at the world. I designed projects that would allow students to look deeply at an issue."

"For years, we've thought that the answer to boosting adolescent reading comprehension lay in building students' vocabulary. Teens often struggle with the jargon and advanced terminology they encounter as they move into middle and high school, so educators have designed curricula and interventions that explicitly teach these complex words. But these strategies aren't always fully effective, according to literacy researcher Paola Uccelli. As she writes, many of these interventions have yielded "significant growth in vocabulary knowledge yet only modest gains in reading comprehension." Too many teens still struggle to understand assigned texts. Uccelli's research explores a new approach. By focusing on how words connect in academic texts - and by recognizing that this connecting language is a possible source of difficulty for adolescent readers - teachers may be better able to equip middle and high school students with the tools to comprehend the texts they're reading for higher-order learning. Her work identifies a set of language features that are common in academic text but rare in informal spoken language. She's found that many of the most common language features of middle school texts are unknown to large proportions of students, even by eighth grade. "