Blog
CIESC would like to welcome a new member to the Professional Learning Team. Lena Darnay is the new Professional Learning Specialist with a focus on Digital Learning.
It was during the Civil Rights era in the 1960s that I graduated from Indiana University and began my first teaching assignment at IPS #21. My class of second graders, all Black, were anxiously waiting to get the school year started—and so was I! It didn’t hit me at first because this was not something the School of Education had included in my teacher preparation courses. However, as the school year proceeded, it became glaringly apparent that none of the textbooks reflected the students I was teaching!
If we’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s that the word “just” is a four-letter word. “JUST click that and it will…” Or “You JUST need to open it so that you can…” How about “If you JUST scroll over there…”
STEM education elicits different images depending on the background of the individuals surveyed. The majority of educators can identify that STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Unfortunately, many educators do not see themselves as STEM educators if their teaching assignment does not fall within one of these categories.
With the absolute best of intentions, we have accidentally turned to a surface-building strategy to encourage our students to write something—anything!—in response to their reading. According to their research surrounding the most impactful literacy strategies, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey reveal that mnemonic devices (aka acronyms) help students to consolidate surface understandings of material.
When you walk into a teacher’s physical classroom, it’s brimming with personality. From posters of a favorite college or sports team to colorful displays of student work, you can tell a lot about the teacher just by walking into the room.
One of the most commonly asked questions I get from districts, leaders, and especially teachers is as simple as it is complex: How do we get our students to improve their short answer response?
As educators, we hear and learn all types of instructional strategies to support student learning. Something we may not be aware of is how these strategies align with the various phases of learning. Visible Learning research has introduced three phases of learning: Surface, Deep and Transfer.
If there’s one overarching request from teachers, it’s the plea for more clarity. Specifically, they are desperate for building and district leaders to communicate vital information and initiative implementation.