Dr. Barbara Blackburn has dedicated her life to raising the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. What differentiates Barbara’s 12 books are her easily executable concrete examples based on decades of experience as a teacher, professor, and consultant. Barbara has taught early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school students and has served as an educational consultant for three publishing companies. In addition to speaking at state and national conferences, she also regularly presents workshops for teachers and administrators in elementary, middle, and high schools.

In this video clip from "How to Tackle the Challenges of Rigor and the Common Core", Barbara Blackburn discusses how to raise the level or content in your classroom to meet the Common Core State Standards!

Teachers, coaches, and supervisors will learn how to help elementary school students build mathematical proficiency with the standards-based, differentiated, small-group instruction strategies in Guided Math in Action: Building Each Student's Mathematical Proficiency with Small-Group Instruction. Dr. Nicki Newton provides lots of actual templates, graphic organizers, black-line masters, detailed lesson plans, and student work samples. In this tip, Dr. Nicki shares seven must-have centers that can be used in an elementary school math class.

The Principal as Student Advocate: A Guide for Doing What's Best for All Students by M. Scott Norton, Larry K. Kelly, and Anna R. Battle offers practical tools and strategies to help principals become strong advocates for every student in their schools. This tip provides the top nine traits that a principal needs in order to become an effective student advocate.

The principal student advocate possesses several special traits that ground his or her personal administrative philosophy...

The following blog post is part of a blog series called "Comments on the Common Core," written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

In the past year, there has been a lot of buzz about the Common Core’s argument writing requirements. The Common Core states that argument writing “holds a special place in the standards” (Appendix A, p. 24). I love teaching argument and agree that it’s important. However, let’s not forget about the other two genres required by the standards—informational/expository and narrative writing. Those genres are also fun to teach and important for students to learn. In this post, I’ll focus on informational writing. I’ll discuss narrative writing in a follow-up post.

Amy Benjamin, author of Big Skills for the Common Core: Literacy Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom, will be presenting a webinar based on the book on February 28th at 1:00 PM ET.

Join Amy for this 2-hour webinar on across-the-curriculum classroom practices that build the academic literacy skills of the Common Core. Amy will provide participants with targeted and sophisticated instruction strategies to help students meet the high expectations of the Common Core State Standards.

Dr. Terry Roberts has been the director of the National Paideia Center since 1993. A former high school English teacher from Asheville, North Carolina, he is a practicing scholar of American Literature and Cultural Studies, with a strong penchant for the classics. He is fascinated by the social and intellectual power of dialogue to teach and to inspire.

In this clip from Using Seminars for 21st Century Literacy, Terry Roberts discusses four strategies for coaching student participation.

Presidents' Day recognizes two great leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the contributions made by other American presidents.

Here are 6 activities your students will enjoy!

100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign Language Classroom  by Thierry Boucquey et al. is filled with stimulating, engaging, and effective games and activities to offer students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This activity, Color by Number, is designed to help students practice their numbers, letters, and basic vocabulary skills in the target language.

In Teaching Students to Dig Deeper: The Common Core in Action Ben Johnson identifies the skills and qualities that students need, based on the Common Core State Standards, to be really ready for college and careers. This infographic focuses on one of these skills, problem-solving, and identifies five strategies that can be used in the classroom to help students bolster their creativity and develop their problem-solving abilities.

Did you know that 141 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged anually? Did you know that roughly 35 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate are sold for Valentine's Day?

Bring that love into your classroom with these fun activities we're sure your students will enjoy!

In Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges, Larry Ferlazzo combines literacy development with short and rigorous classroom lessons on topics such as self-control, personal responsibility, brain growth, and perserverance. In this tip, he outlines 11 elements teachers can incorporate into their lesson plans to maximize their success.

There are obviously many, many things that teachers can do to maximize the chances of an individual lesson going well. This tip shares just a few elements that research (and personal experience) tend to say are important. It is not designed as a universal checklist for teachers to ensure that every lesson they do includes every characteristic listed. On occasion, some successful lessons might not include any of these qualities. Other times, some duds might include most of them.

If you walked through a crowded airport, you would instantly be able to spot pilots and flight attendants because they are professionally dressed in uniform. That is because when you step onto an airplane, you want to feel like you are in capable, competent hands. But wouldn’t the pilot be just as capable and competent if he were dressed in tennis shoes and blue jeans? Yes, but the passengers would not view him that way. So the uniforms are intentional.

The following guest blog post was written by PJ Caposey, author of Building a Culture of Support: Strategies for School Leaders. 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.

The following guest post was written by Rebekah Stathakis, author of A Good Start:147 Warm-Up Activities for Spanish Class. This is the fourth in a five-part series about classroom strategies for staying in the target language.

Even if the teacher is speaking almost exclusively in the target language, if the students are speaking in English, we are still missing the mark. As ACTFL recommends, both teachers and students should be communicating in the target language. How can we encourage students to stay in the target language even when they feel that it is easier to use English? Consider using some or all of the following strategies to help your students use the target language consistently in your class.

In our monthly eNews, we bring you the latest education news, resources, and classroom ideas from the Eye On Education Blog and other blogs we read. Click below for our favorite educational blog posts from the past month.