Our school leaders deal with the challenge of meeting increasing State mandates and student needs everyday.  A wonderful network of educators will be in Nashville October 29th to November 1st to share inspiring stories like the one below, as well as strategies to create an environment where students AND staff will realize their potential.  Please consider sending a representative from your school to learn about positive alternatives to control oriented mandates. Please read on to learn…

Apps to call on students randomly – This Educational Leadership item suggests three apps to cold-call students:

• Pick Me! www.classeapps.com/pick-me generates student names and keeps track of who’s called on.
• Class Cards http://classcardsapp.com lets the teacher quickly rate the quality of a student’s…

Free student perception survey questions – Panorama Education, a start-up developing and analyzing student opinions of their teachers, has just released a free, open-source set of questions that are quite distinct from the Tripod Project’s items. You can access Panorama’s survey here:  http://panoramaed.com/panorama-student-survey

From the Marshall Memo…

How to teach a young introvert

An African proverb speaks about the importance of embracing the wisdom of someone who is new to a place, who can see and bring fresh ideas, along with someone who may have the wisdom born out of experience, having lived though the challenges of figuring out how best to do something.  As we begin the school year I welcome the opportunity to bring these two components of wisdom together in my role as a school superintendent.  It is my hope that the collective wisdom of the school community…

Some Surprising Findings on Kindergarten Math Instruction

In this Elementary School Journal article, Martha Cecilia Bottia, Stephanie Moller, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, and Elizabeth Stearns (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) report on their analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s ECLS-K study (Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey – Kindergarten). The researchers looked at the impact of several instructional practices on student…

Let teachers help teachers with the Common Core State Standards

One of the best aspects of the Common Core State Standards is their focus on student literacy across subjects, rather than segregated in a single subject period of ELA, writes teacher Susan Carle on the Center for Teaching Quality website. Yet many non-ELA teachers have found cross-curricular literacy an uneasy transition. Some difficulty stems from educators asked to teach with unfamiliar Common…