Because success with technology depends largely upon critical thinking and reflection, teachers with relatively little technological skill can provide useful instruction. But schools must support these teachers by providing professional development and up-to-date technology for use in classrooms.
The promise of a successful year is the hope of every student and teacher. Educator Brenda Dyck shares the story of Stephen and ponders the importance of offering a fresh start to every student who enters her classroom.
Effective communication is essential for building school-family partnerships. It constitutes the foundation for all other forms of family involvement in education.
Find out how an elementary school in Sheridan, Wyoming transformed their literacy instruction from a balanced literacy approach to a structured literacy framework. Integrating systematic and explicit instruction resulted in improved reading and writing achievement for their students, and professional growth for all of the teachers.
What’s it really like to be a teacher in your very first year? Listen in as one first-grade teacher reflects on the joys and challenges of her year in the classroom.
A veteran reading teacher shares takeaways from her ‘Teachers as Readers’ learning group. What teachers need: enough time to teach language arts, well-stocked classroom libraries, student input, and meaningful professional development.
Teachers: How do you convince your principal, fellow teachers, and other school staff to help the student in your class who has a learning disability? Rick Lavoie, world-renowned expert, speaker, and author on teaching children with LD, tells you how to get your voice heard. Learn how to handle common road blocks and become a proactive and successful advocate in the hallways, the teacher’s lounge, and the administrative suite.
Too often, teachers say that the professional development they receive provides limited application to their everyday world of teaching and learning. This five-phase framework that can help create comprehensive, ongoing, and — most importantly — meaningful professional development.
“Unexpected schools” — high-performing and rapidly improving schools with large populations of children of color and children living in poverty — demonstrate that they can overcome barriers of poverty and discrimination by making improvement a shared task rather than a solitary one. Many of these schools have achieved academic success by systematically building caring relationships and tackling problems together — unpacking standards, mapping out the curriculum, and developing lessons and common assessments together.
Many school districts have adopted instructional coaching as a model for teachers’ professional development. This brief offers guidance on how school leaders can tailor the most promising coaching strategies to the needs of their schools.
The knowledge and skills base required for teaching reading well is extensive. This outline of a proposed curriculum for teacher education programs in reading covers knowledge of reading development, language structure, and strategies for instruction and assessment.
The Lead for Literacy initiative is a series of one-page memos for policymakers and early literacy leaders on how to improve young children’s literacy, birth to age 9. Using evidence from research, these briefs are designed to help leaders avoid common mistakes and present solutions and strategies for scalability and impact.
In these three video presentations, teachers, administrators, and parents learn from the experts about how to identify students who are at risk for reading struggles in pre-k and early elementary school. You will also discover best practices for teaching all students to read, including those who need additional interventions.
Research shows that effective school leaders focus on improving classroom instruction, not just managerial tasks. A natural way for school leaders to take on the role of instructional leader is to serve as a “chief” coach for teachers by designing and supporting strong classroom level instructional coaching. Here’s how to selecting a coaching approach that meets the particular needs of a school and how to implement and sustain the effort.
For teachers to help more children learn to read, their own learning must be a valued and integral part of their work. Here are guidelines for the conditions for and content of effective professional development in reading.
This article answers four common questions teachers have about vocabulary instruction, including what words to teach and how well students should know vocabulary words.
Effective school reading programs in schools share certain characteristics, from sound methods and materials to quality professional development and administrative practices. Learn about eight features of research-based school reading programs.
If 40 percent of all third-graders are not reading adequately today, reducing this substantially by the time children being born today reach third grade will be an enormous undertaking.
Parents and teachers can sympathize with struggling readers to a point, but they are usually far removed from the challenge of learning to read themselves. However, this reading specialist suffered a head injury and tells her story of what it was like to know how to decode but not to comprehend what she read.
The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and social development. Each dimension falls into one of three board categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.
The NAEP 2000 reading results provides further evidence of a longstanding gap in verbal skills between rich and poor children in the United States. This article describes the history of this achievement gap, speculates on its causes, and makes recommendations for closing it.
Recent research has provided a clearer picture about reading difficulties and how to prevent them. This position paper of the International Dyslexia Association argues for reform in teacher preparation to reflect these research-based understandings.
In order to adopt research-based practices for teaching reading, teachers must be supported with quality professional development that helps them develop an extensive knowledge and skills base. This guide, written by Learning First Alliance (an organization of twelve national education associations), calls for changes in the context, process, and content of professional development in reading.
The development of new teachers in hard-to-staff schools should be of the highest priority for principals, as stability is key to long-term school improvement. Here are some factors principals should remember when recruiting and retaining teachers.
Working conditions play a much larger role than retirement in explaining why teachers transfer, leave a class, or leave the profession. This brief looks at the research about teacher turnover, and finds that while teachers’ decisions to stay or leave a particular school is contingent on a variety of factors, in all cases the key seems to lie in the level of success teachers encounter in raising their students’ academic performances.
