The Eye On Education team is here with a brief message to our customers. Our office, located in Larchmont, NY, escaped the worst of Hurricane Sandy, but is without power and therefore closed. Since our phones are currently not working, please feel free to get in touch with us by emailing insights@eyeoneducation.com. We’ll do our best to help you in whatever way we can. We appreciate your patience and understanding and we’re hoping to be back in full swing very soon.

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—Eye On Education

The Common Core State Standards ask teachers to shift from teaching persuasion to teaching argument. Unlike persuasion, argumentation relies more on claims and evidence and less on emotional appeals.

Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, 6-8 provides a model lesson plan for teaching argument techniques. The lesson shows students how to acknowledge and respond to opposing claims (called concession-refutation). Students use T-charts independently and with partners to flesh out their claims and consider the other side.

We've asked the members of our panel: Have you switched from teaching persuasion to teaching argument? What strategies have you found effective for teaching argument? OR Please describe a lesson you have used to teach argument.

The following poem and tip were written by Annette Breaux and featured in her book with Eye On Education: 101 Poems for Teachers.

We all have lives of our own outside of our classrooms. If you’re a new teacher, then you’re the exception. (Just kidding—but I know it feels like you don’t have a life outside of school right now!) Whenever possible, however, it is important to participate in after-school functions.

Dr. Barbara Blackburn has dedicated her life to raising the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. What differentiates her 12 books are her easily executable concrete examples based on decades of experience as a teacher, professor, and consultant.

In this video podcast, Dr. Blackburn talks about the challenges faced by school leaders to create schools that are rigorous and provide all students with the support necessary to be successful...

It's that time of the year again—Halloween! Students are excited and looking forward to dressing up in costumes, going trick-or-treating, and telling scary stories. Why not bring some of this excitement to the classroom?

Below is a list of five activities we are sure your students will enjoy!

In this post, Sarah T. Meltzer, author of Step-by-Step Professional Development in Technology talks about the importance of assessing staff’s needs when it comes to technology infused professional development.

In this fast-paced society where the use of technology is embedded into all aspects of education, it’s important that we, as educators, take a step back and realize how to successfully integrate technology into our curriculum.  In order to do that, we must first ascertain where our teachers are with technology in general. 

The Common Core State Standards aim to help students become independent learners and thinkers. Students should “become self-directed learners, effectively seeking out and using resources to assist them, including teachers, peers, and print and digital reference materials” (The Common Core State Standards, p. 7). Giving students questions with predetermined answers will not accomplish that goal. Instead, try to make your writing and research assignments more authentic and open-ended, so students can discover information on their own.

The following guest blog post was written by PJ Caposey, author of Eye On Education's upcoming book Building a Culture of Support: Strategies for School Leaders, publishing in November, 2012. PJ is the principal of Oregon High School, an adjunct professor in the educational leadership department for Aurora University, and he is currently pursuing his Doctoral degree through Western Illinois University. He can be found on Twitter @principalpc, and he is a guest blogger for many websites such as ASCD, Edutopia, and Test Soup.

Improving Adolescent Literacy: An RTI Implementation Guide, by Pamela S. Craig and Rebecca Sarlo contains tools for secondary teachers and school leaders to implement a problem solving/RTI framework to help all students greatly improve their reading skills. This tip provides 14 strategies for teachers to use for explicit reading comprehension strategies.

Franklin Schargel's career spans thirty-three years of classroom teaching, counseling, and eight years of supervision and administration as a school administrator. In this video podcast, Franklin discusses best practices in dropout prevention, the "graduation credit card," and an early warning system that can help identify students who are more likely to dropout.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month. A few weeks ago, we presented a blog post titled 6 Steps to Reduce and Combat Bullying, which focused on six things teachers and administrators can do when they witness one child being bullied by another. But what happens when a teacher is the bully? According to a study in the International Journal of Psychiatry, nearly 45% of teachers surveyed admitted to bullying a student...

Using Formative Assessment to Drive Mathematics Instruction in Grades 3-5, by Christine Oberdorf and Jennifer Taylor-Cox, explains the importance and usefulness of applying formative assessment to teaching mathematics. The formative assessments and analyses within the book are particularly useful to ensure that students are meeting and exceeding the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.

Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, 6-8 by Lauren Davis is an easy-to-use guide which contains 25 model lesson plans for middle school teachers. In addition to identifying the Common Core State Standards covered, each lesson includes differentiation ideas, rubrics, and scoring guides. This lesson is designed to meet Writing Standard 8 by having students gather relevant information and assess each source, and includes a three-part sample handout.

In What Great Principals Do Differently: Eighteen Things That Matter Most, Todd Whitaker explains the qualities and practices that distinguish great principals. In this tip, he provides 5 tools that a principal can use to improve teacher performance in the classroom, and deal with negative or ineffective teachers.

As principal, it's your job to improve teacher performance in the classroom. As we have seen, this takes time. The principal’s toolbox contains many options, from walkthroughs and performance feedback sheets to mobile device reporting printouts and so on

The following blog post was written by Lauren Davis. To read more newsworthy blog posts from Eye On Education, subscribe to our Insights eNewsletters.

For years, teachers have been designing persuasive writing lessons for their students. The Common Core State Standards are changing that by asking teachers to move away from persuasion and toward argumentation. In this white paper, we’ll look at what argumentation really means, what the standards specifically require at each grade level, and how teachers can create lesson plans to meet these new requirements.