Welcome to Eye On Education Radio: Expert Voices on School Improvement.

Tune in to listen and learn from podcast speaker…

Amy Benjamin on Literacy in the Content Areas

Long before the Common Core State Standards crossed the threshold of our schools, Amy Benjamin had been a champion of literacy in the content areas. A veteran teacher who currently leads workshops for teachers across the country, Amy reminds us that literacy instruction is everybody’s business. She provides practical strategies to help students learn, process, connect, and remember.

The following guest post was written by Eye On Education author Franklin Schargel. Franklin is the author of many best-selling titles, including the new Dropout Prevention Fieldbook and 152 Ways to Keep Students in School.

President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, called for every state to require students to stay in school until they turn 18. 

The following tip, from 100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign Language Classroom by Thierry Boucquey et al., provides foreign language teachers with a fun and engaging activity to play with students to teach them idiomatic exclamations, simple phrases, and useful travel vocabulary.

During our January 24 webinar, It’s All About MEE, presented by Dr. Barbara Blackburn, Barbara talked about practical ways to activate students’ intrinsic motivation, increase student engagement, and raise the level of expectations in the classroom.

Three key questions were raised:

• How do you help students feel more successful in your class?
• How do you add value to learning for your students
• How do you demonstrate high expectations for your students?

For those who missed it, you can view the webinar on-demand...

Teachers are often expected to come up with creative and innovative ways to teach and explain various math concepts to their students. Math concepts involving the base 10 system, computation, and money can be particularly important, because students will use these skills for the rest of their lives. The following tip from Family Math Night: Math Standards in Action, by Jennifer Taylor Cox, provides teachers (and parents!) with an activity they can play with their students to reinforce these essential skills.

Nothing says more about who you are as a leader than your leadership team and who you hire. Nothing! One lesson principals must learn early is that it is not about you—it’s about the team you assemble.  Here is some advice on filling teaching vacancies!

Teachers are tasked not only with teaching academic skills to their students, but with managing the challenging behaviors that students exhibit in the classroom. This is a difficult task, and one that many teachers struggle with. This three part blog series on Classroom Management Techniques will provide teachers with three interventions they can add to their bag of tricks to help stop classroom disruptions before they start!

Teachers are tasked not only with teaching academic skills to their students, but with managing the challenging behaviors that students exhibit in the classroom. This is a difficult task, and one that many teachers struggle with. This three part blog series on Classroom Management Techniques will provide teachers with three interventions they can add to their bag of tricks to help stop classroom disruptions before they start!

Keep a lookout for this badge on educator's blogs and websites. If you see this, you'll know they're one of our Eye On School Success presenters!

Teachers are tasked not only with teaching academic skills to their students, but also with managing the challenging behaviors that students exhibit in the classroom. This is a difficult job, and one that many teachers struggle with. This three part blog series on Classroom Management Techniques will provide teachers with three interventions they can add to their bag of tricks to help stop classroom disruptions before they start!

David Coleman, a writer of the Common Core State Standards, is adamantly against prereading strategies, in which students are asked to think about ideas from a text before reading it. In the video, Bringing the Common Core to Life, he attacks (his word) the three most popular ways teachers introduce texts. He uses Letter from Birmingham City Jail as a sample text.

According to Coleman, teachers introduce texts by...

School leaders are often asking: What should I look for in classrooms so that I know my teachers are promoting rigorous environments? In this video, Barbara shows school leaders what to look for, focusing on the questioning of students.

The following blog post was written by Terry Roberts and Laura Billings. To read more newsworthy blog posts from Eye On Education, subscribe to our Insights eNewsletters.

As educators, we know the importance of teaching reading and writing, but we often overlook speaking and listening skills. We believe that if we have class discussions on a regular basis, students are naturally learning to speak and to listen. However, that is not the case. On the contrary, speaking and listening skills are ones that must be explicitly taught—now, more than ever, as we prepare students for 21st century careers. The jobs of the future will require collaboration, discussion, and problemsolving as never before. The Common Core State Standards indicate the necessity of teaching speaking and listening.

When I attended NCTE in Chicago, I heard the following misconceptions about the CCSS. I hope to clear things up.

I can’t teach students to write poetry anymore; it’s not in the writing standards.

The second part of that sentence is correct—the standards do not mention poetry as a genre of writing. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t teach it. If you look at Appendix A of the standards, you’ll see the following clarification: “The narrative category does not include all of the possible forms of creative writing, such as many types of poetry. The Standards leave the inclusion and evaluation of other such forms to teacher discretion...

Avoid Power Struggles with Students. Effective teachers do not engage in power struggles with students, period! I was recently observing in a teacher’s classroom when one of the students strutted in and announced to the class, "Guess what! My daddy won the lottery last night, and he said I can quit school, so good riddance to all of you!” I have to admit that I was amazed when the teacher simply looked at him, smiled, and said, "Boy, aren’t you lucky!" and she immediately began teaching. The student had no come-back because he, too, was amazed...