Articles tagged 'engagement'
May 12th, 2010
May means a lot of things. It’s the unofficial field trip month: just try reserving a school bus in May and you’ll find out just how many field trips occur in your district. May is test month. Students take state standardized tests and AP tests in May. They’re stressed until the middle of the month. May is senior month with another senior activity every other day: the senior banquet, the senior field trip, the senior graduation practice, the seniors’ last baseball game or track meet. It’s concert season, it’s the rainy season, and kids are squirrely. You’re packing up, tearing down, collecting, cataloging, figuring grades, and making sure your seniors are on track for passing your class.
May is also project month. We have just weeks left of school; no one wants to lecture students who squirm in their seats and watch the clock. Better to keep them engaged with the content and let them direct their own learning with a project.
April 21st, 2010
This article originally appeared in Teachers College Record, Date Published: 10/3/2004 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11381, Date Accessed: 10/24/2004
Used with permission of the author.
This article views the failure of policy to reduce the learning gap over the past decade as a function of the reforms to solve the most pervasive and fundamental learning blockage faced by [...]
April 14th, 2010
We will not make much progress in achieving educational equity until we develop better approaches for dealing with student boredom and resistance. But student access to on-demand entertainment has made it harder than ever for teachers to interest their classes—members of the YouTube generation—in what they are being mandated to cover. The old standbys of telling students they have to know it because it will be on the test, or making it “authentic,” that is, trying to convince students they will need to know it as adults, have little effect on many students. They are not adults and may be rebelling against adult ideas.
February 20th, 2009
Cell phones often are a source of distraction in the classroom. Despite admonitions to turn them off, someone forgets and everyone hears the incoming call. Text messaging, on the other hand, tends to distract the instructor but no one else. Rather than fight the texting, perhaps instructors can engage students by encouraging them to text about the class subject matter. Obviously, this needs to be done in a structured and meaningful way, and Audience Response Systems (ARS) provide a promising model.
January 26th, 2009
Claude Goldenberg’s article, “Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does and Does Not – Say” is a thorough summary of major research on educating English Language Learners (ELLs). He sites three major findings, one of which is how teaching students to read in their first language promotes higher levels of reading achievement in English. Given the diversity of languages and limited resources of our schools, teaching students in their first language isn’t always possible. However, his two other findings are something teachers can and do everyday. They are: what we know about good instruction and curriculum in general holds true for ELLs and teachers must modify instruction to take into account students’ language limitations.
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