HC English Department

"The eight minutes that matter most are the beginning and endings. If a lesson does not start off strong by activating prior knowledge, creating anticipation, or establishing goals, student interest wanes, and you have to do some heavy lifting to get them back. If it fails to check for understanding, you will never know if the lesson's goal was attained. Here are eight ways to make those eight minutes magical."

"List of advice on writing presented here over the years on Brain Pickings, featuring words of wisdom from such masters of the craft as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean, Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, and more."

"A new book says it's possible-but only if teachers get their students to care about learning for learning's sake."

"You talk to people everyday. But do you really feel like you're communicating? These talks will help you go beyond small talk, to the conversations that nudge along understanding."

Interesting article on grading policies and inquiry. Some of the ideas could be applied to portfolio assessment.

"The Internet, print and other forms of media are full of bias in all its forms. Before you believe everything you see or hear, it helps to be able to detect bias and evaluate whether it is worth paying attention to or not."

"If PBL is to become a powerful, accepted model of instruction in the future, a vocabulary change may be in order - preferably to the term project based inquiry. It's time to not only address the flaws in PBL, but to reinvent it in a way that leads to deeper learning, creative inquiry, and a better fit with a collaborative world in which doing and knowing are one thing. Here are thoughts about five areas in which PBL needs to move forward."

Check this out Penny Wintermute: "Her students would draw on the skills they learned while listening to and studying Serial. They would work in groups (imagine Koenig, Dana Chivvis, Julie Snyder, the engineer who came up with their theme song, Ira Glass). Students would create a series of podcasts told from the point of view of a memoirist they'd read earlier in the year, such as Alice Sebold."

Students can test themselves on using vocab in context. All exercises link to NY Times articles.

"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."

"Below, you'll find a categorized collection of Times articles and Opinion pieces from the 2014-15 academic year about all aspects of higher education - from getting in, to thinking about why you are there, to considering how to fix what's broken. We hope you'll find plenty to discuss. As the school year began last September, Frank Bruni, a Times Op-Ed columnist, issued a challenge to college freshmen to "construct their world from scratch" and seek out people who think differently: Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, yanking students toward unfamiliar horizons and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who and where they already are. And students need to insist on that, taking control of all facets of their college experience and making it as eclectic as possible. We hope some of the pieces below can help."

"Below, all our E.L.A. and arts-related posts. On June 11 we'll publish a list of all of the Student Opinion questions we have asked this year. And if you'd like to go further, here are five more years' worth of lesson plan collections for English language arts, from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014."

"Research shows that reflecting after learning something new makes it stick in your brain."

"In order to see a rise in the proportion of students who class themselves as engaged in school, we must build a better understanding of how they are learning outside school and take account of that in our learning and teaching practice. There are (at least) six powerful motivations fueling learning socially. I call them the Six "Do-Its" and explain them as follows."

"A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning. That's one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down - or, in this case, lay down - to turn out a piece of fiction."

"The most frequent cliché I hear regarding educational policy is, "We're doing this for the good of the students." We undoubtedly mean that, but the fact that students are not included in district-wide and school-wide decision making essentially excludes them from expressing what they perceive as "for the good of the students." It should be conventional wisdom that including students directly and empowering them to help shape high school and district policy would be educationally beneficial for both schools and students."

"So below are (at least) 60 thing you can do with Google Classroom. We'll be updating this list as new ideas come in, the platform changes, and we learn more about its subtleties on our own."

" It's possible to avoid gripe sessions while providing opportunities for feedback and reflection that are strategically integrated into classroom routines. The ideas below can be insightful for students and teachers."

"Often poetry is able to say what prose cannot. We've been seeking poets and poetry to provide fresh insights for our programs. We're collecting the results of those efforts here, whether they're from our programs, blogs, or special features."

"My previous post reviewed research on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and described the four qualities that have been identified as critical to helping students motivate themselves: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and relevance. In this post, I'll discuss practical classroom strategies to reinforce each of these four qualities."