In Teaching Critical Thinking: Using Seminars for 21st Century Thinking, Terry Roberts and Laura Billings show how a seminar approach can lead students deeper into a text and improve their speaking, listening, and writing skills, as recommended by the Common Core State Standards. In order for students to develop these skills, teachers must be able to reach all students during a seminar or class discussion. How can teachers encourage their shy students to participate?

The single, most common question asked by facilitators who are learning to lead seminars is how to get the dominant to talk less and the reticent to talk more.

The following guest post is written by Eye On Education author Cynthia McCabe. McCabe, the author of the title The Fearless School Leader: Making the Right Decisions, recently became the new district executive officer at her school. She will be blogging sporadically about her experience in this new position. Read below for McCabe's thoughts on the "basics" of teaching.

As the District Executive Officer, I have the opportunity to interact with many educators across the nation, as well as in my own district. One thing I’ve noticed lately is how impactful it is to focus on the basics and do them right. 

In his new book The Principal’s Guide to the First 100 Days of the School Year: Creating Instructional Momentum, Shawn Joseph stresses the importance of the first 100 days of school in setting the tone for the rest of the year. He describes how leaders should focus on vision, instructional leadership, politics, data, and planning during those days.

We asked the members of our panel:
What recommendations do you have for principals to build instructional momentum during the first 100 days of the school year?

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

Job-embedded learning, also called learning on the job, is a highly effective and efficient way to foster professional development in a school or district. Administrators and staff developers can create a variety of informal and/or formal job-embedded learning opportunities for teachers, such as lesson study, learning circles, study groups, coaching, and action research. Those kinds of professional development opportunities have several benefits:

They are usually less expensive than paying consultants to come to the school or sending teachers to workshops.

This tip, from Leading School Change: 9 Strategies to Bring Everybody on Board by Todd Whitaker, presents a strategy that will help school leaders leverage an essential group of staff members — their teachers. Todd Whitaker will be providing even more concrete steps for getting colleagues to champion and work toward the school change at Eye On School Success, An Online Conference, this March!

There are 3 categories of educators that will impact school change, “superstars,” “backbones,” and “mediocres.” Let’s examine the category that has the most influence, “superstars.”

Student Schedules
In the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, students take responsibility for scheduling how they will use their time. The amount of forward-looking activities students can manage will depend upon their grade level, the amount of time they have experienced your Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, and the amount of years they’ve studied in such classrooms in the school.

The following guest post was written by Barbara Blackburn, author of Rigor in Your School: A Toolkit for Leaders.

One of the questions I’m often asked is how to use one of my books for a book study. Book studies are a great way to help develop a common understanding of a topic, such as rigor.

This tip, from High-Impact Leadership for High-Impact Schools: The Actions That Matter Most by Pamela S. Salazar, provides school leaders with five key questions they should ask themselves to ensure that they are effectively supporting their teachers, and constantly increasing the quality of teaching in their schools. Pamela Salazar will be providing even more tips for school leaders regarding teacher effectiveness at Eye On School Success, An Online Conference, this March!

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

Teachers spend the majority of the school day behind closed doors with students, and there is little time left after planning and grading to collaborate with colleagues. Indeed, 93% of today’s teachers spend their official working day in isolation from other teachers (MetLife, 2010). This isolation, along with limited opportunities to share knowledge, has led a large number of teachers to explore new careers. In 2008–2009, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported 9.1% of teachers with one to three years experience left the profession  Keigher, 2010). Approximately 46% of these teachers report the most common reasons for leaving are lack of support, lack of influence, and inadequate time to collaborate (National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, 2003).

The following guest post was written by Toby Rothstein Gruber, Eye On Education's Director of Professional Services and the moderator of Eye On Education's professional development webinars.

Have you ever felt like you’ve used all your classroom strategies, yet you still have those certain students that no matter which strategy you try, it just doesn’t work? On our February 9 webinar, Managing Disruptive Behaviors in the Classroom, presented by Bryan Harris we not only identified the 5 most common classroom disruptions, we talked about what to do with them. Just when you thought you were out of strategies, check out what our participants had to say regarding the following common disruptions...

Do Not Procrastinate. It happens to new teachers (and veterans) all the time—they enter into the "I’ll do it tomorrow" cave. I call it a cave because it is a dark and scary place to live! Do NOT—I repeat—Do NOT go in there! It is alluring, I know. We all experience a sense of overwhelm from time to time, and it’s easy to put one thing off. Then two things.

This tip, from Activities, Games, and Assessment Strategies for the Foreign Language Classroom, by Amy Buttner, provides you with a version of Connect Four that you can play with your students while helping them gain confidence in their ability to define and conjugate important verbs!

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

At the heart of the new Common Core State Standards is a focus on higher expectations. One of the major reasons for a push for the standards was the lack of rigor in many schools today, and the need to better prepare students for college and the workforce. Developed in a climate of conflicting definitions and perceptions of rigor, the Standards succeeded in providing a well-defined set of expectations for each grade level in the areas of English/Language Arts and Math. According to the Fordham Institute’s newest study...

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

At the NCTE convention last month, everyone was buzzing about the Common Core State Standards. Teachers wanted to know how the new standards will alter what they teach and how they teach it.

To gather answers to those questions, I attended a variety of NCTE sessions, and I spoke to educators across the country. Here's what I learned. To meet the CCSS, teachers should...