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.

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!

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...

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.

Debbie Arechiga is the author of the newly published Reaching English Language Learners in Every Classroom: Energizers for Teaching and Learning. Her son, Chad, wrote this engaging blog post about Debbie's writing process, and how this book came about.

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.

The Common Core State Standards require students to think and respond at higher levels. Teachers can use think-alouds to model this kind of rigorous thinking for students.

The following 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 more rigorous expectations for instruction. In particular, the standards emphasize the importance of teaching higher-level texts. Here are five easy strategies for increasing text complexity.

The following guest post was written by Rebekah Stathakis, author of A Good Start: 147 Warm-Up Activities for Spanish Class.

As the weather warms up, I know many students are counting down the days until summer break. Students are looking forward to a break from school and homework, but as teachers, we do not want them to completely take a break from using the target language. I know how important it is to use a language regularly in order to maintain and improve your skills. So, while students are enjoying their summer, I want them to be using Spanish in meaningful and enjoyable ways. I have been working on this list to give students, hoping that it will inspire them to use their language skills over the summer!

The Parent–Child Partner Journal Project was designed in the spirit of that first parent–child writing relationship between my friend and her son. By encouraging parents to write with their children, parents are supported and encouraged as they assist their child with schoolwork in a comfortable setting. Parents and children work on easy-to-complete writing activities while breaking new ground together as family writers. The benefits of these activities reach out of the writing notebook to other areas of academic study.