When students walk into a classroom, often the first question is, "What are we going to do today?" It is easy for educators to fall into the trap of using activities exclusively without considering the value or intent of the content. After all, the students are engaged, and if they are busy they must be learning. Simply being busy,…

The dramatic and exponential demographic shift in the United States is more apparent in the public schools than anywhere else, further magnifying the importance of addressing and acknowledging racial and ethnic disparities in education. The increase in racial and ethnically diverse learners requires that teachers engage in Cultural Humility; a…

The video modeling (VM) teaching strategy is one in which a student watches a video of someone performing a specific behavior, skill, or task and is then expected to complete the behavior, skill, or task. This column discusses the variety of ways in which VM has been documented within the literature and supports teacher interest in the strategy by…

Low motivation to participate in traditional or team sports, apathy toward competitive environments, and a low rate of transfer of skills to lifetime activities and wellness can be barriers for student pursuits of lifelong fitness. Adding an outdoor component can be a solution for some of these problems, while still accomplishing the National…

State and national standards, taken as is, can limit the potential of the curriculum and skilled teachers. The ideas presented here suggest ways in which we might better scrutinize standards for their potential richness and limitations in order to enrich our instruction.

The authors of this article collaborated with fourth-grade teachers from two schools to support implementation of a research-based fraction and decimal curriculum (Rational Number Project: Fraction Operations and Initial Decimal Ideas). Through this study, they identified five indicators of rich conceptual understanding of decimals, which are…

Maximizing the effectiveness of evidence-based practices (EBPs) requires an optimal balance of implementation fidelity and adaptation so EBPs fit local contexts and meet the individual learning needs of students with disabilities. The framework for classifying adaptations presented in this article can help educators make decisions about whether…

College and career readiness for all students includes supporting the needs of students with disabilities. Ensuring students with disabilities are college and career ready goes beyond academics and must include self-determination skill development. As schools adapt to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and multi-tiered…

How can geometry teachers design great tasks that allow students to make connections among interrelated concepts and expand their geometric reasoning skills? Many curricular materials provide problems for students to apply a single geometric concept. However, these problems do not always promote reasoning opportunities for students, because…

Shifting your high school's math program to new Common Core standards is much easier when teachers and leaders have this handy guide. Getting a copy for every staff member involved in the process ensures everyone knows: (1) How the six conceptual categories throughout the math standards are connected and reinforced; (2) How the modeling standards…

Go in depth on Common Core Standards for middle schools to learn how they help students build on and extend skills acquired in earlier grades and prepare them for the nuanced communication and analytical work they will encounter in high school. Getting a copy for every teacher ensures they'll know: (1) The key focus areas of the Common Core…

In this article, the authors make a case for teaching vocabulary in the elementary grades through a focus on the morphological structure of words, in particular English words that are derived through Latin and Greek roots and affixes. The authors present a set of engaging instructional ideas for the use of Latin and Greek derivations to teach…

This study examined whether a story/language based method of teaching the multiplication facts would be helpful to students who previously had difficulty with the memorization of those facts. Using the curriculum "Memorize in Minutes" by Alan Walker (Walker, 2000), the researcher taught six fourth-grade students the multiplication facts (3s…

Background: Despite years of intense criticism of contrastive (intercultural) rhetoric, theoretical debate, and controversy, there has been a recent resurgence in the number of high quality pedagogical studies concerning the teaching of intercultural rhetoric in university writing classes for East-Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) writers.…

Social skill deficits and learning disabilities often coexist. Academic work is negatively impacted by students' lack of social skills. Remediation of these deficits in pull-out programs has not generally resulted in transfer to real-world settings. Embedding social skills instruction within literature during a read-aloud session taught in the…