Teacher Created Materials

As teachers we spend a lot of time setting rules and expectations, but there is more to that when we want our students to look like, sound like, and blossom into mathematicians. As you begin focusing your learning community on mathematics you can try these simple first steps.

Whether you are simply thinking about trying Guided Math in your classroom or are reflecting on how you might fine-tune the way you now use Guided Math, consider these five tips to make the most of the Guided Math framework.

A teacher’s language choice plays an important role in developing student-to-student discourse.  To begin, it is important to think about the questions that we ask in our math lessons. Teachers can engage students in discourse by posing genuine questions to encourage discussion and debate, and to require students to attend to the mathematics at hand while explaining and justifying their thinking. A question is genuine when the teacher does not know the answer to them and is sincerely looking to

In honor of National Poetry Month, here is an excerpt from Kwame Alexander’s popular book The Write Thing, which showcases how to use poetry in Writing Workshop to motivate and engage all students through the writing process. In the book, Kwame stresses the importance of sharing your published work.

Helping our students learn to write across the curriculum and across genres is a powerful way to provide lifelong skills. We want to give them confidence and the desire to write. But making the transformation from idea to composition can be intimidating to many students. So how can we make writing a fun learning experience? Powerful teaching strategies are the answer! Here are three things you can try tomorrow.

How many times have you, as a teacher, heard a phrase from your students such as “I need the things, to do the stuff.” The correlation between student vocabulary knowledge and academic achievement is well documented, and all teachers focus on teaching their students the academic vocabulary representative of the grade level and content areas they teach. However, it can be a challenge to get students to incorporate that vocabulary into their own speech and writing. Here are three simple ways to he