On the heels of the Common Core Standards Initiative and President Obama’s Race to the Top competitive grant program, the Board on Science Education and the National Research Council has begun to draft new Science Education Standards. These standards, like the Common Core Standards for English and Mathematics, are striving to ensure that just as in Math and English, there are common expectations and learning goals for the sciences across the nation.

Eye On Education recently published Annette Breaux's newest poetry book, 101 Poems for Teachers. The book is illustrated by L. Susan Brandt. Read below for a poem and strategy about taking responsibility for the successes and failures of your students. This tip was originally featured in an Eye On Education Insights eNewsletter. 

It's summer! Now that you have some time to relax and read, here are our favorite Ask Our Authors blog posts from this past year. You can catch up on any you missed, or just sit down for half an hour and re-read everything that catches your eye. Enjoy!

All coaches fall somewhere on a coaching tree, similar to a family tree, except that where the latter shows a person's family heritage, a coaching tree displays the working and mentoring relationships among a network of coaches.

The book Activities, Games, and Assessment Strategies for the Foreign Language Classroom by Amy Buttner provides over 100 activities for foreign language classrooms. Read below for an effective way to use house-hold Mad Libs in your lesson plan. The students will probably have seen (or even played with) Mad Libs before and they will get excited about the opportunity to express their creativity and knowledge in a quirky way. Have a few students volunteer to read the finished Mad Libs aloud to the entire class; the students will enjoy hearing silly stories from their peers. This tip was originally featured in an Eye On Education Insights eNewsletter.  

Have you ever wondered how your students’ work compares to that of other students across the country? EdSteps is a new educational website that houses student writing samples and gives teachers and parents that opportunity. This tool uses voluntary and anonymous student writing submissions “to measure individual students’ progress over time and answer questions about whether students are on track to success.” An educator can greatly benefit from a source such as EdSteps because it seeks to answer every teacher’s question: “Where is a particular student now, and what should he or she do to improve?”

The new book by Chris Hitch and Dave Coley, Executive Skills for Busy School Leaders, functions as a best practices handbook to help you fulfill all of your leadership responsibilities. Read below for the authors' suggestions on working well with a multi-generational faculty.

This tip was originally featured in an Eye On Education Insights eNewsletter.

During the summer, a major concern for teachers and students alike is losing the knowledge, insight, and skills they learned over the past school year. In fact, according to the Book Whisperer blog contributor, Jimmy S. Kim, “[I recommend] that children read four or five books over the summer to maintain their end-of-school-year reading levels.” In an effort to help educators avoid the summer-slump in productivity, Eye On Education has collected ways for both educators and students to stay plugged-in to learning this summer.

Todd Whitaker's bestselling book for principals, What Great Principals Do Differently, was featured last week on Angela Maiers' popular education blog, Angela Maiers Educational Services.

The post, titled " Top 10 School Leadership Books," highlights Angela's favorite educational books for school leaders. She talks about the use of What Great Principals Do Differently in helping principals do their jobs better over time. Angela writes:

Many people are struggling to understand the implications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. According to ABCNews, “Science teachers nationwide are using the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a "teachable moment." Teachers are incorporating the oil spill into science experiments designed to show the effects of crude oil on the environment, but also into lesson plans featuring political debates and social sciences. Educators are also seeking guidance on how to best speak to their students about the oil spill.

This tip was originally featured in an Eye On Education Insights eNewsletter.

In a rave review from the Teacher Leaders Network of Teaching Grammar: What Really Works, Marti Schwartz, creator of NETWorking (Novice and Experienced Teachers Working Together) at Brown University, summarizes the book’s core strategies for incorporating grammar learning into writing instruction. "This is smart teaching!" says Schwartz, explaining that concepts which teachers have found tedious to learn and teach in the past are now made crystal clear, fun, and productive, for both themselves and their students.

In her book How the BEST Teachers Avoid the 20 Most Common Teaching Mistakes, Elizabeth Breaux illustrates common mistakes that teachers make and ways to correct and avoid them. Read below for an excerpt from Mistake 16, Delaying Feedback.

This tip was originally featured in an Eye On Education Insights eNewsletter.

Examples of the Mistake

Mr. Procrastinate has a motto: “Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow.” He has learned that some things can even be postponed indefinitely. “If you put it off for long enough, people sometimes forget.”

Elizabeth Breaux’s bestselling book, How the Best Teachers Avoid the 20 Most Common Teaching Mistakes, has been given a positive review on Angela P. Watson’s popular education blog, the “The Cornerstone.”

The post, entitled “Review: How the Best Teachers Avoid the 20 Most Common Teaching Mistakes” highlights Breaux’s straight-forward language, stating that the book has a “unique, easy-to-read format, with Breaux dividing her advice for each mistake into identical sections: Defining the Mistake, Examples of the Mistake, Correcting the Mistake, Avoiding the Mistake, and Bottom Line...