I aim to put best practices into place, and while I often fall short, I know that an educational professional embraces a growth mindset and keeps applying the strategies that benefit students. Below are how I approach creating a learning environment, providing learning experiences, planning impactful lessons, using instructional strategies, and providing formative assessments.

Creating a Learning Environment

When students see growth and positivity as the educational norm, then they are empowered for individual and classroom success. This requires patience, flexibility, resolve, and most importantly, leadership from a teacher.

• Adolescents react well best there is consistency, enthusiasm, and positive encouragement.

• Students need teachers to set clear procedures for them in the immediate moment that is aimed at them flourishing in the longterm.

• It is important to quickly assess the moment when students have an a-ha moment and amply it.

• Risk, bravery, and curiosity must be valued, even when it leads to failure.

• Conferences can deepen the student-teacher relationship and give students the one-on-one attention they require.

• Teachers need to actively explain that they are lead learners rather than the keepers of all knowledge.

• Activities need to have a purpose, otherwise students can see that the learning lacks authenticity.

Providing Learning Experiences

I want to make learning relevant, interesting, and accessible for students, but while accomplishing this goal, I never want to sacrifice the successful academic habits that underpin rigorous education.

• The art of teaching is bridging the language of students and the language of academics without losing rigor. 

• Innovative projects give meaning to student learning.

• The more autonomy and ownership that students possess over their learning experiences, the deeper they will learn.

• Gamification strategies can change what used to feel like drudgery into something exciting.

• Pop culture can be used to untangle distant literature, complicated histories, or esoteric ideas.

• Visualizations that articulate difficult concepts can make learning feel effortless.

• Real-world context is less ornamental and more essential.

• The more teachers connect students with intellectual and artistic opportunities in their surrounding community, the better.

Planning Impactful Lessons

Whether we are selecting resources, structuring our classroom management, or trying to strike the delicate balance between direct instruction, student-centered practice, and reflection, we know that the decisions we make before a class determines its success.

• Teachers are only as impactful as our planning is thoughtful.

• Teachers need to explain why skills are relevant to students and communicate the underlying standards.

• Driving questions, lines of inquiry, and essential questions should be explicitly communicated and require higher-level thinking.

• Big ideas require succinct descriptions and then the space for minds to wonder.

• Students should be empowered to follow their inquiry as it arises.

• Students deserve an intentional beginning and ending to each lesson.

• Teachers should convey information in direct instruction efficiently and remember that sometimes inefficient student discussions are most helpful. 

Using Instructional Strategies

With a limited amount of time, we must choose the instructional strategies that most impact students. Our strategies might not be ideal or executed fully, but if we are intentional, then we can give students a purpose and help them become lifelong learners. We know that students can often become their own best teachers when given a purpose.

• The most important thing a teacher can do for student growth is giving them time to write meaningfully and read widely.

• Targeted feedback from a teacher has the power to stimulate growth, but general and unthoughtful feedback is near meaningless.

• Students need to reflect fully on what they learn and why it matters.

• Teachers are best equipped to help students after checks for understanding.

• Teachers must model how to write intentionally and read strategically, but this is best delivered as just-in-time instruction.

• Strategic grouping can allow students to find challenges within their zone of proximal development.

• Workshopping is meaningful for creative thinkers, and from what I have seen, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project has given a successful framework to the workshop model.

• Students need to be reached through multiple intelligences, so visual aides must accompany written text, and whenever kinetic activities can be incorporated, they will improve the lesson.

• Higher-level organizational skills can only be built through scaffolding how to absorb, arrange, and reassemble information, but this will look different for each learner.

• Teachers need to adjust for appropriateness the depth of answers required in student writing, verbal answers, and discussion.

Providing Formative Assessments

Students recreate themselves daily through new learning, so the most important decision a teacher makes is what strategies to learn how a student has grown and what is that student’s next step.

• Polling and sampling can quickly show how students perform and what they need.

• Conferences can add qualitative context to a student’s learning experience.

• Students can use digital communication tools to reflect on their anticipations or self-assess their learning process.

• Student-oriented goal-setting sessions help students clarify what they need and teachers clarify what they can provide.

• Teachers can survey students on their comfort with skills and concepts.

• Scaffolded assessments that build on common skills give students several chances to practice the skill during an assessment cycle.

• Checks for understanding can help guide realtime decisions of what information is essential to a lesson.

• Exit tickets for a particularly tricky subject can guide reteaching decisions.

• Teachers can teach the art of brainstorming bravely and evaluate that it for gaps in student knowledge.

• Collecting data allows teachers to identify areas for growth and track individual student growth.

• Celebrations for improvement helps normalize healthy progress.