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It is teaching towards each student's strengths, and allowing their weaknesses to develop into future strong points.

Quite frankly, the course of action begins with the very basics of how you run your classroom. Begin the year by getting a grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of your students through the use of the available data, like benchmark testing results, standardized test scores, pre-tests, student inventories, portfolios, guidance folders, and/or classroom grades from the previous year; although those important items are just the beginning of your learning process. They give results and information, but they do not tell you how the student got there.

a responsive classroom that differentiates is one where the teacher prides him or herself on getting to know the students as individuals. From my own experience, once you tap into that resource, you can more easily find ways to connect with everyone in the classroom.

Rubrics provide clear criteria for evaluating a product or performance on a continuum of quality.  Rubrics are not simply checklists with point distributions or lists of requirements.  Well designed rubrics have the following in common: 1. They are task specific: The more specific a rubric is to a particular task, the more useful it is to the students and the teacher.  The descriptors associated with the criteria should reference specific requirements of the assigned task and clearly describe the quality of work at each level on the rubric. The rubrics to the left are all posted as Word documents so that teachers can tailor them to a particular task. 2. They are accompanied by exemplars: The levels of quality described in the rubric need to be illustrated with models or exemplars.  These anchor papers help both the students and the teacher to see and understand what quality work looks like as it is described in the rubric.  These models or exemplars can come from past student work or the teacher can create a model to share with the class. 3.  They are used throughout the instructional process: The criteria used to evaluate student work should be shared as the task is introduced to help students begin with the end in mind.  Rubrics and models should also be referenced while the task is being completed to help students revise their work.  They should also be used after the task is complete, not only to evaluate the product or performance, but also to engage students in reflection on the work they have produced. Ideally, students should be involved in the process of generating rubrics through the careful analysis of exemplars; by studying the models, students draw inferences about the criteria that are important to a successful product and then describe different levels of performance for each criterion.

Reading and writing texts online are basic skills that students need to be literate citizens in the 21st century. Teaching with blogs provides the opportunity to engage students in both of these literacy activities, and the strategy has the additional benefit of enabling students to publish their writing easily and to share their writing with an authentic audience.

When students write entries and comment on the entries of their peers, blogs become an integral part of a lively literacy community.

After students have posted entries, talk about the purpose of blog comments. Look at the comments on a popular blog or posted on a local newspaper in response to articles. Emphasize the importance of providing useful suggestinos and supportive feedback.

Although a lesson could target 17 indicators under 5 different standards, we must prioritize objectives by choosing three which we will emphasize in terms of student learning outcomes.  The magic number seems to be “3″

Centering instructio

or asking students to write (this year in student blogs in my class) about how the texts connect both to the students themselves and to the other texts in the unit.

Middle School & High School GamesEngaging teens in anything that smacks of grammar is usually a difficult task. To teach grammar and hopefully have some fun, try these games. Games are a fun way to engage students in tasks where they do not even know they are learning. Plus, they encourage teamwork and allow for kinesthetic learning. Students can play Stick it the Quickest and word sorts, which require Post-Its and chart paper. Some games require cards and larger teams. One grammar game requires baskets and balls to show correct grammar use. Whatever game you select for your students, they will enjoy this type of grammar practice over a worksheet any day. Choose the game for the grammar topic: Eight Parts of Speech Game Eight Parts of Speech Sentence Sort Grammar Lesson: Action Verbs and Verbs of Being Lesson Identify Noun Case Activity Identifying Parts of Speech Review Game Variety is Important in English Grammar Lessons

If your students struggle with passive voice, contractions, run-ons, comma splices, or pronouns in their writing, try one of the following lessons.

what is a writer?" (I must admit I didn't come up with this brilliant idea, but adapted it from a suggestion from another instructor.) Students would always come up with different ideas about what that meant, but more often than not they never talked about themselves as writers. They thought of published authors as writers. They thought of people who sat in a sunlit room all day with a stack of white pages (or in front of a computer) as writers. They thought of people who were paid to write as writers. My students often did not think of themselves, or their instructors, as writers.

tell students on a regular basis that writing isn't only important because they need to graduate or pass a class but because it is the key to engaging other scholars in conversation. Even in informal media such as Twitter or Facebook we write to get our ideas across or to interact with other academics. And even though we can argue that academic writing is not the same as tweeting, the rules of engagement are similar: we value clear, well-argued writing in each case. We value thoughts that are well articulated. We value creative, interesting posts that steer away from the clichés. Therefore, I think the most important advice I can share with my writers is this: think of yourselves as writers.

I believe that thinking of yourself as a writer can change the way you feel about writing in general