Teacher Created Materials

With many of today’s standards calling the use of HOTS, or higher order thinking skills, it can feel really overwhelming at times. So, this may seem a bit oversimplified at first, but I have found it extremely valuable in giving students a concrete way to break down their thinking. In fact, even the most able students have responded to this strategy with, “Well, I already knew the answer, but this helped me see how I got there.” Cool, right?!

The very best teachers we ever had as students involved us in the learning process. They drew us in and got us making our own connections to what they were teaching. They may have also created a sense of cognitive dissonance, or mental discomfort, that we wanted to resolve. Creating an environment of active learning that engages students promotes deeper understanding and long-term retention of the concepts we are teaching.

Clothesline Math is nicknamed the master number sense maker because it requires students to think harder about quantities while simultaneously making it easier to see their relationships to each other. To create this tool in your classroom, simply hang a long string—like a clothesline—somewhere that all students can see and interact easily with. The numbers for the clothesline are created by folding paper or index cards in half and writing the numbers on the front. They can be integers, fracti

During my first years of teaching, one particular evaluation has stuck in my head all of these years. It ended with one word from my principal, “Closure?” It suddenly became glaringly obvious to me that too many of my lessons ended with the bell ringing. Ugh…not exactly best practice to say the least. Since then I’ve tried out lots of ideas and have come up with some “go-to” ideas that I now use to end ANY lesson.

On the surface, a text-dependent question (TDQ) is simply a question whose answer can be derived directly from information in the supporting text. However, for

A classroom where active learning takes place is one that includes time for collaboration, various forms of communication, and the freedom for movement. This type of classroom demands that students be engaged learners who create knowledge—as opposed to passive ones who only receive information. It also changes the role of the teacher from one who bestows knowledge to a teacher-coach and mentor who acts as a facilitator and provides support and guidance for learning.