The first year of teaching can be overwhelming.  Trying to navigate an often illogical system and find your niche in the school culture that you hope to thrive in is stressful enough.  Add in trying to apply all you have learned about teaching and learning during four years of college while struggling with classroom management, student motivation, and parents, and there are a lot of sleepless nights.  I remember questioning my choice to be a teacher often…

Let’s Stop Grading Our Kids on Responsibility

BY AMBER CHANDLER · 09/11/2016

How an award-winning teacher uses an app and camera phone to reinforce good math skills

Leaders are extraordinary people. To be clear, we are talking about persons who choose to take the responsibility of leading and do so with integrity and with courage and with purpose, not those who have simply attained positions of power and authority. The difference is often revealed in moments.  In schools, sometimes leaders can be found within those who step into that role when a crisis arises or who speak up when a wrong is being done or who become a champion for those who are…

How to Teach for Real Life Learning

BY MIDDLEWEB · 07/30/2014

Our Schools Need Leaders, Not Managers

Psst! Your Writing Instruction Is of Little Consequence

Lack of funding, crumbling infrastructures, reduced faculties and administration, low salaries, corruption and poverty are all contributing factors to school failures. Now, the rise in the number of competing charter schools is either another causal factor for failures or the long sought solution. Just as it is not unusual for teachers to think of their sphere of influence as their classroom or school, we, as leaders, may limit our thinking to our local buildings or districts. But,…

Award-Winning Kids' Books…

Schools are faced with moral dilemmas every day.  The implementation of a new set of standards may come accompanied with moral dilemmas.  Even more obvious are the dilemmas about team names and mascots. Schools who have taken on the fight between those who hold strongly to the tradition of a name and those who feel deeply the offensive meaning of a name know the difficult nature of the fray as they engae the two groups and come to a decision. Other moral dilemmas are presented in…

 Schools will immediately become better if reading is taught correctly in the first few grades. in fact, all the phonics experts say you can do it four or five months.

 The problem now is that many teachers do not realize they have been given hopeless methods and unreachable goals. The only thing sadder than the situation just described is that so many teachers put up with it.

 So let's cut to the chase. Children cannot be…