The following blog post was written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

The Common Core State Standards place an emphasis on process, not just content. We can’t just teach students a bunch of facts; we have to show them how to learn. If we simply fill students’ heads with information, they may forget it days later. But if we teach students how to research, discover, question, and obtain new information on their own...

I may be smarter than you or I know. So challenge me to think, and we'll both know if that's so! The point I’m trying to make is that we, as teachers, often assume too much. Just because a student knows an answer or can memorize a given piece of information, we assume that he understands. This is often not the case. Knowing informational facts and being able to apply that information by thinking critically and using the information to solve problems are two different things.

The following guest post was written by Barbara Blackburn, author of the best seller Rigor is NOT a Four-Letter Word. Learn more about Barbara Blackburn here.

As you work on aligning your lessons to the Common Core, you may wish to reconsider the questions you ask students. Are they rigorous enough? Will they lead students to a deeper understanding of a text or topic?

Reaching English Language Learners in Every Classroom: Energizers for Teaching and Learning, by Debbie Arechiga, is filled with practical tools, strategies, and real-world vignettes to help you teach reading and writing to a diverse student population. This tip is designed to provide teachers with techniques you can use to flood your students with vocabulary throughout the day to improve student comprehension and literacy skills.

The following blog post was written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

The Common Core State Standards for grades K–5 indicate that students should write opinion, informative/explanatory, and narrative pieces. The best way to help students learn how to write in these genres is to show them a variety of real-world exemplars, or mentor texts....

Family Reading Night, by Darcy J. Hutchins, Marsha D. Greenfeld, and Joyce E. Epstein, offers clear and practical guidelines to help engage families in student accomplishments by conducting a successful family reading night. This tip provides an activity to prepare your students and their families for summer reading, while wrapping up what they've learned this year!

In Multicultural Partnerships: Involve All Families, the authors stress the importance of involving multicultural families to boost students’ success in school: “Teachers, principals, counselors, and other educators know that good teaching is not enough to ensure student learning and development. They know that they must involve all families in their children’s education.”

We have asked the members of our panel: What strategies has your school used to build relationships with the families of multicultural students?

The following blog post was written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

Earlier this month, I attended the International Reading Association’s 57th Annual Convention, held this year in Chicago. The event brings together educators and educational publishers from across the country to share best practices and resources. I was accompanied by Eye On Education’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Annamarie Cerreta. We had a great time! Here are some highlights from our trip.

In our monthly E-News, we bring you the latest education news, resources, and classroom ideas from the Eye On Education Blog and other blogs we read. Click below for our favorite educational blog posts from the past month.

The following tip, from Informal Observations On the Go: Feedback, Discussion, and Reflection (3rd Edition), by Sally Zepeda provides school leaders with several helpful guidelines for conducting efficient and effective informal classroom observations.

The following guidelines for informal classroom observations are offered as a starting point for framing this important work.

Informally Observe All Teachers

All teachers can benefit from informal classroom observatin. Refrain, however, from "overobserving" particular teachers...

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, and you know what that means, principals… It’s time to shower your hard-working teachers with brand new cars, all-expense-paid vacations, and as many extravagant gifts as you can shove into their mailboxes.

 Okay, maybe expensive cars and trips won’t fit into this year’s budget, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show your appreciation to teachers in other ways...

Children learn as children play, so play with your students every day! While I was conducting a presentation on effective teaching for high school and university teachers, a college professor volunteered the following: “When I walked into the training today and learned of the activities that were going to be conducted, I almost walked out. I thought it was going to be ‘elementary.’ However,

This tip, from Activities, Games, and Assessment Strategies for the Foreign Language Classroom, by Amy Buttner, provides you with a fun and challenging activity to help your students practice grammar and sentence structure: Grammatically Correct Nonsense Sentences!

This type of activity encourages your students to look at words in a more creative way. To play, students work together to form sentences that are grammatically correct but make no sense...

Can you remember the schoolyard jingle that went, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Obviously that was not and is not the truth. Both physical and nonphysical forms of bullying can happen anywhere in the school, on the way to and from school, and even online. In recent years, bullying has become a “hot button” issue both in and out of school: “Over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year, making it the most common form of violence experienced by young people in the nation” (Hirsch, 2012).

The following post was written by Bryan Harris, author of 75 Quick & Easy Solutions to Common Classroom Problems and Battling Boredom: 99 Strategies to Spark Student Engagement.

 In June of 2011, I wrote a newsletter & blog titled 7 Ways to Go From On-Task to Engaged, which turned out to be one of the most popular topics of the year. In it I spoke about the possibility that students could technically be on-task but cognitively and emotionally unengaged in the actual learning.