When dealing with the loss of a student or grief in the classroom, a teacher should prioritize open communication, acknowledge the grief, provide space for students to express emotions, and connect them with appropriate support systems like counselors, while also maintaining a sense of normalcy in the classroom by continuing with routines while being sensitive to individual needs.  Check out our quick link at the top or here for resources.

This week we’d like to share some information and resources about Question Cubes.  Our resources are linked here and included in our Active Reading Strategy folder. The article “Using Question Cubes to Boost Reading Engagement” discusses how the activity of question cubes gives students the opportunity to collaborate, boosting engagement and deepening their understanding of class texts and is supported by Hattie’s research. 

Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15 to October 15.  We have a quick link button at the top of Coaches Corner that will bring you to our shared drive with many resources to help you celebrate this month in class.  Spanish Mama is a helpful site with Latino resources including podcasts, books, songs, apps, games, and downloads for all teachers to use quickly and easily.

This summer we encourage you all to spend your time off doing something you love…but may we also suggest picking up just 1 book built for teachers.  While it’s important to unplug from the school year and recharge… reading a positive book written for teachers can help empower you to start the next school year with a fresh mindset.  Check out some of the current popular teacher titles if you find yourself with some downtime this summer. 

This week we have an activity for the math CREW!  Math war is like the kids's card game war, where the entire deck is distributed to players, two players per game, and they blindly lay down a card and the player with the higher card wins the hand.  Math war has a special deck of cards where the students have math problems, equations, graphs, or tables that the students need to evaluate before determining who wins the hand.  Here is an example using rate of change (slope) representations.

TQE ARTICLE

 Special shout out to our newest teachers in our CREW this week.  Whether you are a veteran teacher or a new teacher we have a teacher resource tool kit for you to check out.  Resources on learning spaces, designing assessment, classroom management, tech integrations, working with parents and more!

Check out our resource folder

Active reading strategy 1: Claim evidence reasoning 

CER is a great way to get our students to engage with text.  Check out Model Teaching-CER &  its lit teaching-CER along with many other resources in our shared folder for active reading strategies.

Tuesday, 8/9 Bloom Trail presentation on our Instructional Focuses

          Focus Area 1- Reading & active reading strategies in everyday teaching.  

          Providing Meaningful Experiences with Text—BDA (Before, During, After)

                 Sheet 1-Set a Purpose, Preview, Predict– Before

                Sheet 2- Make a connection, Annotate, Question and Infer- During

                Sheet 3- Summarizing, Evaluate, Synthesize:After

                Focus Area 2- No Opt Out Teaching/Learning in everyday teachingEngagement Strategies

        Sheet 4-No Opt Out

                Focus Area 3- Feedback Loops that center on student-to-student feedback and self-evaluation 

                Sheet 5-Feedback                       Sheet 6-Metacognition

Social media can play a positive and negative role in our students lives and it can dominate our students lives inside and outside the classroom.  The article focuses on three problems that social media creates for our students and conversations we can have to help our students make the best choices as they explore social media. 

Our schools are only as good as the conversations in them. Whether that be from student to student, student to teacher, teacher to teacher, or teacher to administrator. Attached is a great short article from ASCD called " The Learning Zone / The Conversation Workout" reminding us how and why to keep having these conversations. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-learning-zone-the-conversation-workout

Do you have any students who could have made better choices quarter 1?  Yeah, us too :) Here is a reflection tool to get our students to set some goals to make better choices this quarter.  Remember to MAKE A COPY 

Mentimeter is similar to Peardeck, Nearpod, OR  a google form with google slides.  If you are looking for a free and different format this might be something you like.  The free version of Mentimeter, has the following features:

• Maximum of 2 questions (Word cloud-my favorite, Multiple choice, open ended, scales, ranking, and Q&A (and 5 of the Quiz question type)

• Unlimited number of Content Slides.

• Unlimited number of presentations.

• Unlimited number of audience size/voters.

• Export results in PDF or individual image screenshots.

These work great as a quick bellringer, icebreaker, or for a larger audience if you don’t want to log into google, Nearpod, or Peardeck.

Check out this great article from Edutopia about feedback :)

 https://www.edutopia.org/article/continuously-refine-your-practice-student-feedback?utm_content=linkpos10&utm_source=edu-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-2021-08-11-A

Its been a tough year for teachers.  USA Today took this opportunity to shine the spotlight on some educators who have not only stuck it out, but have made major impacts on their students this year.  Teachers who've learned to rap in order to appeal to their students, teachers who opened a nonprofit theater to keep kids involved, teachers who've hunted down seniors and forced them to get grades up, as well as teachers who openly rely on the students to get through this year as well.  

As the Chauvin trial continues and more information is released about how Chicago Police fatally shot 13 year old Adam Toledo one can't help but to have strong feelings.  Beyond that we have to acknowledge how our students may also struggle with these difficult issues.  To support our continued efforts to best address these topics with our students we have added some articles and lesson plans in our growing folder about "Difficult News Cycles (teaching strategies)"  These resources can be found easily using our quick link button in the header.

For better or for worse, we've relied pretty heavily on video instruction this past year.  This article brings to light that there are massive differences between watching a video and engaging with a video for learning.  Watching a video is passive, like watching tv, while engagement will activate a learner.  Remove the verb "watch" from our vocabulary when considering video instruction.  Instead, replace it with "interact" as if it were a video game and encourage students to pause, rewind and reflect during the video as many times as necessary.

"Why is sitting in front of a screen all day so exhausting?!"

The article focuses on student Zoom/Meets fatigue but it resonates for all of us.  Try to make small talk when appropriate and find time for it in class.  Have a student show off a pet at an appropriate time.  Walk around and get blood flowing.  Or bring a guitar to work and serenade the hallways!  Mr. Rogus is killing it!