Teachers are frequently told to use "research-based strategies." At the same time, they face unreasonable workloads, with inadequate time and resources to engage with the research and evaluate it themselves. In the same professional development workshops that elevate the importance of research, teachers are also told to focus on…

Authors of the newly revised Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Liesl McConchie and Eric Jensen offer whole-brain approaches teachers can take to engage students in new learning and retaining that knowledge.

Although there has been much debate about how "learning loss" is conceptualized and the degree to which the pandemic has affected it (Dickler, 2021; Jacobson, 2021; Strauss, 2021), one thing is certain: the pandemic has likely exacerbated the instructional gaps that students already had, especially in the case of those who attend…

While waiting for an after school meeting to begin, Carol Ann Tomlinson found herself chatting with an high school history teacher as he shared the struggle he faced to help a large population of English language learners (ELLs) who had recently arrived at his school. He spoke of how supporting these students was a new challenge for the staff, and…

In this article, veteran educator Otis Kriegel provides eight questions that teachers can ask themselves as they create or tweak lesson plans. With practical, straightforward advice, Kriegel suggests that teachers be mindful of who their audience is, how much students already know, and what materials they'll need. He also urges teachers to…

Math education consultant Marilyn Burns finds that teachers ask her the same three questions so often she's named them "The Big Three": What can I do with students who finish their math work more quickly?, How can I free up time to work with kids who need extra help?, and How can I differentiate math learning experiences? Burns, who…

Although human beings communicate mainly through talking and listening, schools tend to spend little classroom instruction time helping ELLs develop their English oral language skills, writes Wayne E. Wright. In reviewing the research on ELLs' oral language development, Wright concludes that bilingual programs give ELLs the best opportunities to…

Good essential questions rarely emerge in the first draft. Common first-draft questions typically are convergent low-level questions designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry. So how can teachers ensure that subsequent drafts…

The term "best practice" is widely used throughout education despite lack of evidence or consensus concerning which practices are "best." The pervasive use of this term creates three problems. First, it promotes a plug-and-play approach, in which teachers are encouraged to adopt new methods and use them as much as possible but…

In this article, Alfie Kohn discusses four questions about questioning--starting with questions that are more basic, and progressing to some that are "deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling." He begins by considering what questions we should ask students, and encourages teachers to keep questions with…

As a new wave of unaccompanied minors flowed across the border between Mexico and the United States in 2014, educators began to scramble to educate students who came to them with little or no English, having survived traumatic and arduous immigration journeys, and often with significantly limited formal schooling. Many of these children were…

According to author Dylan Wiliam, because lessons never go exactly as planned, teachers should build plan B into plan A. This involves designing a lesson with a "hinge" somewhere in the middle and using specific kinds of questions--what he calls hinge questions--to quickly assess students' understanding of a concept before moving on.…

Getting students to ask questions can feel like pulling teeth. How can teachers transform that feeling and create classrooms that come alive with questions? The authors, developers of the question formulation technique, suggest two simple changes: First, teachers need to give students both a structure and the opportunity to practice generating…

All people are shaped by the culture in which they live, but it can be difficult for all of us to grasp that people shaped by other cultures will see and respond to the world differently than we do. These cultural differences can cause teachers to misunderstand students. For example, an educator might assume that quiet students have a language…

Without a change in our technology integration strategies, there's no reason to expect that a new device will magically create new teaching practices. In some iPad classrooms, students are engaged in truly innovative work. On the whole, however, tablets are most often used to reproduce existing practices. To make the most of their investment in…