This Week's Topic

On the first four Sundays in April, the topic for the week will be posted. Once you completed your blog post, come back here and fill out the form to add your post to the blog round up.

After you write your post, share it using the #DCSDblogs hashtag on Twitter (if you’re on twitter) and be sure to mention in your post that you’re writing it for this challenge!

Then come back here and submit the relevant information about your post below to be included in the summary post and entered into the drawing for some cool swag!

*If you're a bit behind, or are discovering this site AFTER April, feel free to respond to the prompts and submit your post through the forms still! We will continue updating the post roundup page whenever a post is submitted!

Week 4: April 23 - April 29

The theme for week four is Tips and Tricks. Write as if you are giving some tips to a brand new teacher. What are the things you’ve learned in your years of practice that you wish you had known? These are the tricks and strategies that don’t necessarily come out of a textbook or a college class, but that you’ve realized are effective through years of experience.

Some possible topic ideas:

· How do you build relationships with your students?

· How do you get through to struggling students?

· How do you motivate your students to want to learn the content?

· How do you get and stay organized?

· What do you wish you’d known on your first day?

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this challenge, and I hope that it gives you the motivation and inspiration to continue blogging past this challenge! If you’re blogging on your own, a good beginning goal is to write a post at least once a month! Hopefully you’ve found some other blogs through this experience to inspire you and help keep you going.

Week 3: April 16 - April 22

The theme for week three is Oops! Please tell us about a mistake you made this week, how you handled it, and what happened in the end.

We all make mistakes constantly – it’s part of the teaching and learning and reflecting cycle. Sometimes they’re small mistakes, like you forgot to collect the assignment you gave yesterday. Sometimes they’re big mistakes, like you posted the Quadratic Formula for them to copy down in their notes and it had a typo in it.

Some of them you roll with easily and some of them might have you struggling to fall asleep at night, thinking about how you can fix it.

Share one of them. What happened? How did you react to it in the moment? How did you address it later? How did your students react to the original mistake, and how did they react to your solution?

Week 2: April 9 - April 15

The theme for week two is Teachers Learning from Teachers. We want to hear about the best thing you’ve ever learned from another teacher!

Was it a lesson they shared that you now use all the time?

A stress reduction technique?

The funniest story ever?

Feedback on a lesson you taught?

An organizational system that saved your life?

New approach to grading or giving homework?

To get inspiration for this week, you might consider taking time to observe a colleague this week (maybe one of the model teachers in your building) and seeing if you can learn something. Or maybe talk to one of your TLCS teachers and ask them to come observe you to give you some feedback! You could make an appointment to chat with a TLCS teacher to talk about grading practices or giving academic feedback or motivating students.

Of course, it can be based on something more casual – a conversation you had in the hallway with a coworker that changed your outlook or something you saw on their classroom wall and asked about.

Maybe it’s something you learned while student teaching from your mentor, or in the new teacher program. There’s endless possibilities for learning from other teachers – tell us your best one!

Week 1: April 2 - April 8

The theme for week one of the challenge is One Good Thing. Write a post describing something good that happened in your classroom/building this week. It could be a student who had a breakthrough, an activity that went really well, a great conversation with a coworker. There are no limits – it could be something that happened during a lesson, or before or after school, during passing time, at a staff meeting…wherever you see good things!

Tell us about why the moment stood out to you. What made it so good? How did you feel, how did students feel? Was it a quiet moment that no one noticed but you, or did everyone pause to celebrate it?