When the proverbial $#*t hits the fan. Let’s face it. Lesson planning takes time, effort, attention to detail, and long hours of thinking about all the ways it could blow up in your face. That being said, even the most fastidious, dedicated and detailed oriented educator can not, and will not, think of everything. An […]
Read more "The Busted Lesson"I’m one of the best. Truly I am. I don’t say it with a hint of hubris either. It has taken years of honing this singular skill into something efficient as it is effective. Even when my my kids are watching intently (when a 2yr old AND a 4yr old are glued to the hunt…. […]
Read more "The fly hunter"When I first wrote up my latitude and longitude activity for this blog, I thought it might be helpful to a few geography teachers and that was about it. I never expected that the post would become an example of modern teaching in practice. Never did I imagine that teachers would be asking me to post […]
Read more "The Grid Part II: The First Activity"When do you find time to conceptualize the layout of your classroom? In a perfect world, there would be scheduled time for teachers to organize the space in which they create learning. The reality however, is that the first few days before the school year starts is over packed with meetings, more meeting, development meeting, […]
Read more "How do you prepare your classroom?"Reflecting on reflections I know what you’re going to say. “Well, duh! Of course they should!”, you might snipe sarcastically in my direction. I would agree with you wholeheartedly, too. The one and only #mschat tackled the role, place and need for reflecting in teaching. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart and […]
Read more "Should teachers reflect on their practice?"I’ll be honest with you. I love to read esoteric stuff online. One of my favorite ways to waste time online is actually getting lost down what I call the “Wikipedia Wormhole”. I’m sure you know what I mean. You might have heard it called other things over the years such as, “The Wikipedia Time Suck”, […]
Read more "Let’s go down “The Wikipedia Wormhole”"Reflecting on my reflections. I’m going to get all metacognitive here and go for some introspection. For the past week I’ve been writing a reflection of each of the six questions brought up in the #mschat for the week of Dec 3rd, 2014. I’m sitting here feeling a few different emotions but mostly I’m feeling […]
Read more "What learning should we celebrate in school?"As educators, we tend to think that our students look at us as always have the answers to their questions. We often go to great lengths to research a unit so that we make sure we have the answers to all sorts of ridiculous and banal question that could possibly come up in class. I started my career […]
Read more "Why saying “I don’t know” is the most powerful tool a teacher has."If you are new to teaching, you’ve probably had dozens of veteran teachers tell you that having your daily agenda posted in a highly visible place is essential to having regular success in your class. They’re right, you know. An agenda board is not just for your students to have a reference point for the […]
Read more "Agendas in the classroom. Use them."Most teachers have encountered a class that starts off a bit rambunctious and needs some extra convincing to get down to business. I have seen a whole host of different techniques over the years that have all worked to varying degrees of success. Usually it depends on the teacher in question but often the tactic employed has just […]
Read more "How to get a classrooms’ attention."
peter spiegel 