Education Lane
Cathleen Weber PhD | January 2022
EVERFI Tax Lessons
Free lessons from EVERFI will allow teachers to introduce and teach financial literacy to elementary, middle and high school students.
In addition to financial education, EVERFI also offers engaging lessons in social/emotional learning, health & wellness, and college/career readiness.
Mind Maps
Sometimes brainstorming creates pages of information, but no clear view of how it fits together? Mind Mapping is a useful technique that supports learning, improves information recording, shows how different facts and ideas are related, and enhances creative problem solving.
Mind Maps are useful for:
- Brainstorming – individually, and as a group.
- Summarizing information.
- Taking notes.
- Consolidating information from different sources.
- Thinking through complex problems.
- Presenting information clearly.
- Studying and memorizing information.
Essential Questions for Every Teacher - Beth Rock M.Ed.
As a Professional Learning Community, there are four main questions that we consistently address:
- What do we expect our students to learn? (Goals and Expectations)
- How will we know they are learning? (Assessments)
- How will we respond if they don’t learn? (Intervention)
- How will we respond if they already know it? (Extended learning for higher level students)
Our awareness and strategy to address these four components will have a significant impact on our classroom environment. Instead of thinking of formative and summative assessments as tools that tell us if a student “passed”…let’s think about that information in terms of “What do they know?”, “What don’t they know?”, and “What are we going to do about it?”.
Data helps us to determine what success might look like in regard to our educational goals. We can’t get a true snapshot of student needs or potential with just one piece of data. Exploring data from previous years, benchmark assessments, progress monitoring, taking time to discover interests, being attentive to family dynamics, and individual conversations with students will all help to inform a learning strategy that guides each child along an educational path.
John Hattie uses the terms learning intentions and success criteria. We should be asking ourselves what we want students to learn…not what do we want students to do. When teachers have a clear vision of how they will determine success, it is much easier to focus on activities that are truly meaningful.
How Novice and Expert Teachers Approach Classroom Management Differently
There are many components that factor into successful classroom management. Some techniques are related to how teachers deal with discipline problems in the moment, while other strategies are more subtle and focus on preventive steps that are integrated into the classroom culture and lesson plan.
Traits of Successful Teachers
EMC2 Learning
EMC² Learning offers playful, purpose-driven, professional development and resources to educators. By tapping into the applied science of gamification and game-inspired instructional design, EMC2 helps teachers create dynamic, risk rich classroom environments powered by student-centered curiosity.
While there is a yearly membership fee to access all of the resources this platform has to offer, there is also a free version (Tinker Teacher) that allows you to sample some of the awesome resources that Matera and Meehan have created.
EMC² Learning is a collaborative partnership and teacher training venture developed by teacher/authors Michael Matera and John Meehan and launched in Spring 2020. Meet the creators in the video below.
Education Lane LLC
Email: cweber@educationlane.net
Website: educationlane.net
Location: PO Box 122, Cooksville, IL 61730
Phone: (309)825-3512