Evidence-based teaching has dominated the field of education ever since the beginning of the 21st century, when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) included it as part of its wide-ranging education law that applied to all schools receiving federal funding (e.g. most schools).  The term itself dates back to 1991 when a Canadian physician,...Read More

Spelling is part of the Common Core State Standards, but doesn’t receive much coverage in education journals.  Often teachers use the same old same old strategies to teach spelling skills, including:  use the word in a sentence, copy the word ten times, look it up in the dictionary, say the letters of the word as...Read More

Every lesson plan begins with a beginning.  Unfortunately, in all too many classrooms this beginning sounds something like this:  ”Now class, turn to page 428 of your textbook.” There’s nothing there to grab students (quite the reverse:  many kids will disengage from the class at that point). Every teacher needs to have a kit bag...Read More

Over the past decade there’s been a lot of debate about whether Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is valid as an approach to guide instruction.  I’m going to take up the points of this debate in a future post.  But right now, I want to argue for the most persuasive reason why every teacher...Read More

Activity centers have long been seen as an effective way to have children or teens engage with learning material in a hands-on and experiential way.  However, for many teachers, the construction of such activity centers in the classroom may seem time consuming, require non-existent funds, and/or be just another burden to one’s teaching load.  Here...Read More