Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History

How do you ensure students get the most out of black history and Black History Month? Here are some suggestions.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Cultural Competence

With ever increasing cultural diversity in our schools, how do educators establish and maintain effective relationships with those whose experiences and beliefs differ from their own? Dr. Darryle Craig, program manager for Fairfax County Public Schools College Success Program, presents her ideas and strategies for becoming "Culturally Competent.” According to Dr. Craig—cultural competency is “the ability to interact effectively with people from different cultures.” During the program, Dr. Craig defines and examines the importance of cultural competence. Using first-hand examples and questions from the studio audience, Craig advises how to use this important skill to help close the achievement gap, and promote best practices that create success among diverse learners.

Material Type: Lecture

Author: Fairfax Network

Response to Intervention, K-5

Informational resources and tools available to guide those who wish to establish or strengthen an Response to Intervention program in grades K-5.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Response to Intervention, Middle School

Across the country, educators are beginning to expand RTI to secondary schools. Middle, junior, and high schools are very different places from elementary schools and, in fact, different from each other. Whether or not your school is presently implementing RTI, you will want to be prepared to ask and answer key questions regarding the opportunities RTI presents in high school settings.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Response to Intervention, High School

Across the country, educators are beginning to expand RTI to secondary schools. Middle, junior, and high schools are very different places from elementary schools and, in fact, different from each other. Whether or not your school is presently implementing RTI, you will want to be prepared to ask and answer key questions regarding the opportunities RTI presents in high school settings.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Think-Pair-Share Technique

In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique. The Think-Pair-Share strategy is designed to differentiate instruction by providing students time and structure for thinking on a given topic, enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with a peer. This learning strategy promotes classroom participation by encouraging a high degree of pupil response, rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response. Additionally, this strategy provides an opportunity for all students to share their thinking with at least one other student which, in turn, increases their sense of involvement in classroom learning. Think-Pair-Share can also be used as in information assessment tool; as students discuss their ideas, the teacher can circulate and listen to the conversations taking place and respond accordingly.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Tracking and Supporting Student Learning With Kid Watching

In this strategy guide, you’ll learn how to use kidwatching to track and support student learning. Teachers observe and take notes on students’ understanding of skills and concepts and then use the observations to determine effective strategies for future instruction. Yetta Goodman popularized the term kidwatching, the practice of “watching kids with a knowledgeable head” (9). In kidwatching, teachers observe students’ activities, noticing how they learn and what they do to explore their ideas. Teachers then examine anecdotal notes and other evidence to see how and when students engage in learning. After this review, teachers use their observations to differentiate activities to meet the needs of individual students. The strategy is based on “a seek-to-understand stance by attempting to look at life, literacy, and learning through the children’s eyes” (Mills 2). By discovering how students learn, teachers are able to choose the most effective strategies for each pupil.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Assessing Student Interests and Strengths

In this Strategy Guide, you'll learn about a number of specific methods that can help you to gain a fuller picture of the interests of your students as well as what your students understand, know, and can demonstrate by doing. By understanding the varying literacy strengths and habits of our students we can identify what Vygotsky calls their "zone of proximal development" where literacy opportunities are not too hard as to frustrate or too easy to bore but just challenging enough to promote student learning. With a keen eye, we can observe the interests and strengths of our students and, when possible, we can consider these to plan learning opportunities for our students. By providing choice and respectful tasks, we can provide meaningful literacy experiences.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Promoting Student Self-Assessment

In this Strategy Guide, you'll learn about a number of specific methods that will promote self-assessment and contribute to a richer understanding of student learning. Because of their diverse literacy needs, our students need us to differentiate the product, process and content of learning according to their learning style, interest and readiness. Yet, recognizing student growth and literacy needs requires more than one voice and more than one snapshot. Research has reminded us of the value of continued assessment and of students as partners in their own assessment. This heightened metacognition leads to increased engagement across content areas and remains a key characteristic of life-long learning. Motivation to learn increases when students are asked to critically analyze their own learning. And, if continued assessment informs instruction, students and teachers benefit from student feedback about what a student does and does not understand.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Making Connections

Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Students who make connections while reading are better able to understand the text they are reading. It is important for students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences to connect with the text. Students are thinking when they are connecting, which makes them more engaged in the reading experience. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. However, teachers need to know how to show students how a text connects to their lives, another text they have read, or the world around them. In this strategy guide, you will learn how to model text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections for your students so that they may begin to make personal connections to a text on their own.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Making the Reading Process Visible Through Performance Assessment

Effective differentiation begins with purposeful assessment. In this strategy guide, you’ll learn how to construct an authentic performance-based reading assessment that will give you access to students’ thinking before, during, and after reading.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategy Guide: Exit Slips

This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically. The Exit Slip strategy is used to help students process new concepts, reflect on information learned, and express their thoughts about new information. This strategy requires students to respond to a prompt given by the teacher, and is an easy way to incorporate writing into many different content areas. Furthermore, the Exit Slip strategy is an informal assessment that will allow educators to adapt and differentiate their planning and instruction.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Response to Intervention, Teacher Preparation

As RTI becomes more widespread, it is critical that all professional education programs integrate the knowledge and skill sets into the curriculum and clinical experiences. This page highlights a number of the informational resources that are available on this site for use in professional preparation programs.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Response to Intervention, Parent Resources

Families are critical partners in effective implementation of RTI. As states and school districts work to implement an RTI process that provides early help to struggling students, parents need to understand the essential components of RTI and the roles they can play in supporting their child’s success.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Teaching Accessible Science

All students can fully participate in science. To that end, we are sharing some of the resources, materials, and activities that we use with our students who are visually impaired.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Strategies for Working With Emotionally Unpredictable Students

Some students are challenging due to internal frustration, defensiveness and aggression. This resource provides teachers with appropriate responses.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Teaching Children With Developmental Disabilities

When working with children with developmental disabilities, teachers can accomplish a great deal by managing the learning environment proactively to prevent behavior problems and promote learning. But identified students may also experience behavior or learning problems because they lack key skills (e.g., capacity to interact with other children in socially appropriate ways). Children with developmental disabilities should therefore have explicit skills-training in deficit areas as a central component in their curriculum.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

Kids as Reading Helpers: A Peer Tutor Training Manual

While the long-term negative impact of poor readers can be enormous, the good news is that schools can train their own students to deliver effective tutoring in reading to younger peers. Kids as Reading Helpers: A Peer Tutor Training Manual is a complete package for training peer reading tutors. Peer tutoring answers the nagging problem of delivering effective reading support to the many struggling young readers in our schools. Furthermore, peer tutoring programs can improve the reading skills of tutors as well as tutees (Ehly, 1986) and - in some studies-have been shown to build tutor's social skills as well (Garcia-Vazquez & Ehly, 1995). Young children tend to find the opportunity to read aloud to an older peer tutor to be quite reinforcing, adding a motivational component to this intervention.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Jim Wright

First-Year Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers: The Challenge of Working With Parents

The significance of relationships between the parents and teachers of preschool and kindergarten children is well established. Teachers and schools are presumed to be responsible for lack of parent-teacher collaboration. Early childhood teacher education programs recognize this and offer support related to parents and families.

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Sehba Mahmood

New Teacher Center

New Teacher Center (NTC) is a national non-profit dedicated to improving student learning by accelerating the effectiveness of new teachers and school leaders. NTC works with schools districts, state policymakers, and educators across the country to develop and implement induction programs aligned with district learning goals. Site includes articles and strategies to help new teachers..

Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy