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This article highlights the realization of Seymour Papert that electronic devices could increase education in isolated geographical regions facing poverty. Although we don't have school districts living in isolation in the United States, we do have poverty stricken districts with little to no technology available to the students. Seymour Papert had a vision "of a digitally enhanced learning experience [helping] close some of the gap that exists among urban and rural, well-resourced and poor schools."

In the educational world of increased expectations and rising standards, teachers and school administrators understand the importance of closing the achievement gap. Project Star, a major longitudinal study of the effects of class size, discovered that reducing the number of...Read more ›

Increasing class sizes is a problem educators across America are facing. This article address how to counter this issue while still focusing on closing achievement gaps. One strategy mentioned is intentional small group instruction. Differentiating instruction by allowing high level learners move on independently while conducting mini lessons to those still struggling with a lesson, can help a teacher overwhelmed with class size.

Main idea is a difficult skill for many readers. In order to be successful students need to be able to make inferences and determine the importance. Those are tricky prerequisite skills for students to grasp as they require higher order thinking. However, being able to successfully understand the main idea of a text leads to other skills like comparing and contrasting multiple texts. So how can a teacher effectively help their students master this skill? This blog article breaks down the skill into seven scaffolding steps, which are then broken down into three areas (keywords, stated main idea, and inferencing). Also included are videos to help teachers create quality main idea instruction, worksheets, and additional resources. #mainidea #scaffolding #resources #inferencing #keywords #higherorder

In this blog, Dr. Gianfranco Conti, Phd., founder of The Language Gym, discusses Schmidt's "Noticing Hypothesis" - noticing the gap between the first and second language. Noticing the gap and the similarities between the L1 and L2 is an important piece of language acquisition. Benefits to implementing this strategy include improving reading, pronunciation, grammar instruction, spelling, and essay writing.

Academic language is a meta-language that helps learners acquire the 50,000 words that they are expected to have internalized by the end of high school and includes everything from illustration and chart literacy to speaking, grammar and genres within fields.

This KQED blog post provides information on current and past research that indicates how important movement and the use of our bodies are to learning. This research is called "embodied learning". The discussion on highly decorated classrooms is worth further exploration. This would be another great article for a text-based discussion in a PLC. The math and physics examples can be adapted for other content areas for use as instructional strategies.

(Week 9: Benjamin, Cheney, and Gretchen) This article is accessible through the link provided above. The main focus of this article is to inform educators of the positive effects movement can have on student learning. This article provides a series of studies where students were presented with different problems, mostly math, and encouraged to represent the problems with movement. Students who used physical movement to represent and solve mathematical problems demonstrated higher levels of success than their age-related peers who simply solved by reading a problem to themselves or aloud. This article is useful for all members of my team as it suggests methods for adapting physical movement to all content areas. Within this article it is suggested ""When students use their bodies in the learning process, it can have a big effect, even if it seems silly or unconnected to the learning goal at hand" (Schwartz, 2015). I think most teachers can find reassurance from this research-based article knowing that the implementation of movement doesn't have to fit directly with curriculum unit. The teachers within my specific team can use the practice of movement as an alternative method for instructing desired skills such as decoding strategies for reading or identifying/constructing numbers in base ten. Reference Schwartz, K. (2015, March 26). Why kids need to move, touch, and experience to learn. Retrieved from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39684/why-kids-need-to-move-touch-and-experience-to-learn

Week 8 - This is an article on activating the working memory for learning. It offers strategies and suggestions of simple activities to exercise the brain on a daily basis in any content area.

Week 8- Article posted by Concordia Online Education in Teaching Strategies and shares 4 effective learning models (hands-on learning, collaborative projects, experiential learning, and direct instruction) that educators can use when engaging their students. Not only does the article define what these 4 models are and why they are important, it also provides examples of how these 4 models have been used in the classroom.

This article talks about gaps when it comes to vocabulary used by students. Some of the suggestions in this are very helpful. This year, we noticed that our 5th grades have a very basic vocabulary. When it comes to answering questions verbally or in a written response, students do not use vocabulary that has been introduced related to the topic. They often substitute it for an easier word or use the same word repeatedly. This also impacts students when they need to use context clues to determine the definition of a word in a text. I like the idea of an interactive word wall in the classroom or sending give and take conversation starters home with students.

As a teacher, it is important to find ways to meet all students needs academically.

Finding multiple ways to meet each child's learning needs can help a child reach their SMART Target learning goal. Through this website, teachers can learn new ideas to use in their classroom.

This blog post explains the way to close the achievement gap in a mathematics classroom. The article touches upon stereotypes and ethnic and racial disparities, and other ways for educators to close the gap for their mathematics students.

Wow, what an interesting article! I'd never really considered racial inequality in math instruction before, but after reading the article, something to consider. One of the suggestions was to remove homework from math instruction due to some studetns unstable living situations. This makes sense and I think as teachers we often forget what some of our students are dealing with at home.

I really liked this article and the ideas in it. I try to celebrate the mistakes in my classroom, using them as a lesson within a lesson. I understand the point about homework, however I will continue to give my students homework. We are supposed to be preparing them for college. I don't remember one college class where most of my grade didn't come from work outside of class.

This article shows the success a group of schools have in teaching instruction when there is a purposeful, intimate focus on individual teachers. When teachers are given proper tools, instruction, and guidance, they will succeed in instructing students and therefore a greater percentage of students will have a better understanding of what is being taught.

Focused teacher development is needed to achieve student success! This is 100% true and this article talks about this in a great way. Great find!

I found this article helpful in the importance of providing individualized professional development to teachers so they are able to grow their practice around targeted skills students need to master.

In this online resource a teacher shares how to have students collaborate on the writing process using the online tool/app of Socrative. It is articulated very well and this is a process I have used in the past with AP writing students!

At the New Mexico School for the Arts, they tried a variety of approaches for using data to improve student achievement, and didn't get it right at first. This article shares what they learned.

We live in an age of personalization and customization -- and companies know it and are gearing their efforts to serve our needs in the way they think we want to be served.

Students, by the time they are in high school, should hopefully be able to motivate themselves and be ready to take higher math classes like algebra, geometry and statistics. Unfortunately, in our American society many people have a fear of math and numbers, suffer from a lack of motivation and rarely have a strong foundation to stand on for the math skills required by high school courses.