After a trying few weeks, English teacher Michele Dunaway has arrived at some insights about what kids learn in school: "Here are the things schools teach, the things schools and teachers do that can never be addressed or assessed by fill-in-the-bubbles."  Continue reading...

Teachers, these sites should help you find something good for the youngest to the most advanced readers in your classroom.  Continue reading...

The new semester is starting, and a colleague proudly announced on Facebook that he is banning laptops, tablets, and cell phones in his classes because students are using them to go on Facebook. Other colleagues, who seem always to be trumpeting their support for the digital revolution on their own Facebooks, promptly "commented" their own plans to institute classroom bans on these attention-sapping devices.  Continue reading...

Michele Dunaway teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri (when she's not writing best-selling romance novels). As 2012 begins, she's been thinking about some New Year's resolutions for the classroom. Here she shares seven of them.  Continue reading...

The bad news: SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low, and recently released NAEP scores reveal that American students' vocabulary growth is "flat." The good news: It's no longer 2012. It's 2013, a new year, a time to buy gym memberships and to overhaul your vocabulary instruction. Just do it.  Continue reading...

Okay, I'll commit educational blasphemy. I'm not a fan of whole-class/large-group discussions. I don't care what you name them (one of the most common monikers is Socratic seminars), but get more than 10 people in a group and it becomes a license to zone out.  Continue reading...