What is the purpose of grading?

Grading has been a hot topic recently. I was in a Twitter chat last night (#mschat) that focused the entire hour on some of the issues and concerns about teacher grading policies. Since my office has construction workers cutting a hole in my exterior wall today, I’m not going to be able to write that […]

Why you should leave your work at school at least twice a week.

Teachers have this nasty habit of not being able to stop thinking about their work. Even during the holidays you might see a teacher at a Thanksgiving dinner steering the conversation to what they are currently doing in class to ask for input from those around the table. You might even see that same teacher […]

Getting ready to teach with Google Earth

This post will be broken up in to several different posts to get you started with the basics of Google Earth. There is a lot of information and it sometimes feels overwhelming but some there are only a few simple buttons and commands that you really need. I will illustrate each of them to show […]

Why you need to visit another classroom

It is so hard to get out of our classrooms these days. With the amount of grading, planning, meeting, and TEACHING that teachers accomplish on a daily basis it is no wonder that once you enter your classroom at 6:30am, you might only leave it to go to the bathroom around noon. These expectations seem […]

Student Voice in class. What does that look like?

There is so much talk about giving students a voice in the classroom these days but very little tangible evidence of what it looks like. What are specific examples of student voice in class? How is it accomplished and made to be part of the routine of a high functioning classroom? It takes a teacher […]

Off topic tangents are a good thing for class

You know that moment in class when the lesson veers (rarely by design) into some esoteric, off-topic, or inconsequential idea that lasts for more than a half hour. My students used to love these days because they would think that nothing important ever happened and it was usually good for a lot of laughs, some weird […]

Why teachers should get to school early.

Teachers as a whole, are generally considered to be prompt, fastidious perfectionists that are maniacal about the inner workings of their classrooms. Some teachers feel the compulsion to arrive at work at the crack of dawn and settle in and begin preparing lesson plans, photocopying, and classroom organization hours before the first student walks into […]

What does curiosity look like in the classroom?

I ask myself that question constantly. The look of engaged students chomping at the bit to ask more and more questions. Kids getting into arguments about hypotheses and debating all sorts of ideas. This is student led learning at its best. But how do we as educators actually create that in the classroom? What protocols […]

Connected

As an educator I see lots of ideas come and go. There always seems to be the ‘next-big-thing’ that will revolutionize the way education is done. What the reality is more like is there are solutions to specific types of problems that only work if there is enough buy in from the faculty within the […]

peter spiegel

teaching