As a new teacher, I spent most of my time focused on instruction, my primary concern being what I needed to teach and how I was going to teach it. Assessment and grading was at best a nuisance and at worst a necessary requirement. Needless to say, my consideration of assessment and grading was an afterthought, usually poorly developed and poorly constructed measurements of student learning.
Youth with juvenile justice contact are a unique population that require deliberate and collaborative reintegration into the school setting to reduce their likelihood of a re-offense and to help promote their academic success. Roughly 55% of youth who engage in delinquent behavior re-offend within twelve months (Mathur & Clark, 2014). This post will offer information on strategies for supporting school reintegration.
As quantitative psychologists who study education, teachers and parents often ask us, “What went wrong with all these tests, and how can we fix them?”
At best, educational assessments—from large-scale standardized exams administered over an entire state, to targeted cognitive diagnostic tests used by psychologists in schools—are considered a necessary evil by the teachers, parents, and students who are subjected to them.
“Describe the tongue of a woodpecker,” wrote Leonardo Da Vinci on one of his to-do lists, next to sketching cadavers, designing elaborate machines, and stitching costumes. Da Vinci filled over 7,000 notebook pages with questions, doodles, observations, sketches, and calculations. He nurtured creativity as a habit and skill every day—and it paid off. Da Vinci’s work reshaped multiple disciplines, from science, to art, to engineering.
Luckily for teachers who regularly use lectures to teach, we have many options to create engaging lectures for our students. No longer do we need to rely on embarrassing ourselves by singing and dancing to engage students. While I still sing and dance in my class, I’ve also added some interactive lecture tech tools for the days I can’t hit the high notes. Interactive lectures not only engage students with the content but allow teachers to collect data to check students learning and progress.
There is a growing body of research which suggests that blogging can enhance education through reflective practice and can help you to look at your own experiences to improve the way you work. In addition, the emerging field of blog psychology tells us that blogging brings a host of mental health benefits, and it offers us opportunities to expand our knowledge.
Sometimes, keeping students engaged in the classroom feels like an uphill battle. Teachers work long hours, are held to high standards for content delivery, and have a voluminous amount of preparation and grading to complete every day. We all know that experiential activities and inquiry-based strategies are related to student engagement. We are also fully aware that creating classroom environments that employ these approaches take a lot of time. Therefore, in spite of the research, “lecture continues to be the predominant mode of instruction.” [1]
The Odyssey School is a unique, co-educational independent day school in Stevenson, Maryland that meets the specialized needs of high functioning dyslexic children as well as children with other related language learning differences who are five years through 8th grade age. The School utilizes evidence-based methodologies to prepare our students for success at challenging mainstream secondary schools. The program provides a 3:1 student to teacher ratio and focuses on specialized instruction, character education, and opportunities for students to explore and develop their passions, interests, self-awareness and self-advocacy skills.
In a recent article, Stephen Chew and William Cerbin claim, “Teaching and Learning are lost in a buzzword wasteland.” Teachers struggle to figure out what works and what doesn’t, some quickly adopt any new strategy while others are stuck on worn out ideas that long ago ceased to work. Our students don’t recognize the buzzwords, but they’ve been subjected to numerous educational innovations in various classrooms leaving them with no uniform understanding of how their learning actually works. We certainly don’t know everything, but we can start by making sure that all teachers and students understand the basic processes behind encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories.
Students are heading back to school, which can be a source of stress for many kids and teens. Whether they feel overwhelmed by the amount of work a project requires or they feel anxious about taking a test in a subject that they struggle with, academic stress can be a challenge. Luckily, there are lots of ways to help your children manage their school work without overwhelming anxiety or stress.