Archive
Recent Newsletter Articles
The Best Way to Learn Math is to Learn to Fail Productively
Manu Kapur's research finds that students are more successful when teachers allow them to have a period of (teacher-planned) productive struggle with material before the teacher provides direct instruction on the math strategies. Read More
Problem Strings
Problem Strings are an instructional strategy where the teacher facilitates students working through and thinking aloud about a set of math problems (for example: 5 x 6, then 5 x 60, and so on...) as a method for students to learn from each other about math strategies. The strategy offers a way to pack significant math learning into a short time in class. Read More
For Teachers: Please Don’t Teach Exponent Rules
A teacher writes about how he approaches operations with exponents so that the students make meaning and discover the rules for operations with exponents for themselves. Read More
ELL Math
This teacher, who teaches a math class for students who speak very limited English and a variety of primary languages, writes about strategies he is using "so students with a strong mathematical background in their own country can advance while the students with a weak background can get feedback and work on the problems they need." Read More
Writing SMART Goals for English Learners
This blog post from Ellevation provides an overview of a webinar where participants learned how to transform the commonly used SMART goal-setting framework and make it directly applicable for EL educators. The full recording of the webinar is available using Adobe Connect. Read More
Writing Across Borders
Writing Across Borders is a 3-year documentary project whose purpose is to help faculty, writing assistants, and other professionals work more productively with international students in writing environments. Read More
Transforming Grammar Instruction: Moving from a Traditional Practice to a Functional Practice
Sheri Lear, and adult ESL teacher from Minneapolis, MN, outlines her approach to teaching functional grammar in this lesson plan. The plan provides teachers with an explanation of functional grammar as well as a concrete example of how it integrates grammar instruction into the overall context of the lesson. Read More
ThoughtCo: Writing Skills
This website contains articles on English writing skills for a variety of purposes, including essays, formal and informal letter writing, resumes, business documents, that include examples and instructions. The articles can be printed for use in the classroom. Read More
The Teachers’ Room: Correcting Errors
This video shares different things teachers should to take into consideration when correcting errors, and gives suggestions for ways to do learner-friendly error correction in the classroom. Read More
Visible Thinking
Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. This website provides a convenient way to learn about Visible Thinking as well as thorough descriptions of the ideals, routines and activities that were developed from research in K-12 schools. Read More