When teachers familiarize themselves with students’ reading lives and histories, they may uncover reading trauma — moments when students had a negative experience with a peer, teacher or librarian that turned them off of reading. Students with reading trauma associate reading with painful feelings of shame or stress and doubt their reading abilities, said Boston-based educator Kimberly Parker in a recent webinar organized by the Texas A&M Collaborative for Teacher Education. Take reading logs, for…
Sidhi Dhanda is a 17-year-old junior at Hopkinton High School in Massachusetts who wrote the following piece to mark the fifth annual Student Press Freedom Day. The event is meant to call attention to the fact that student journalism faces barriers to reporting on key issues. Only 16 states have laws that protect the First Amendment rights of student journalists and that mitigate the effects of the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood School…
It’s normal for teenagers to be moody at times. But when are an adolescent’s mood swings a sign of something more like mental illness? Mental illness is more common in teens than you think, but many types of mental illness are treatable, and it’s just a matter of pinpointing the diagnosis. Teen mental health is often something that cannot be addressed without a parent’s help. Here are 6 facts about mental illness in teens that…
Elizabeth Dunham, MLS, is a retired marketing executive and current adjunct lecturer at York College of Pennsylvania. She teaches courses in business communication as well as the first-year experience. Here is her first person account of how she incorporated low-stakes oral presentations into her courses to build her students’s confidence. Most students dread presentations. Every time I start a new semester, and I announce that presentations are a requirement, the fear and tension in the…
Sentence stems are great for many reasons, not the least of which is their ability to function as cognitive training wheels for developing minds. Like journal response prompts, the stems below are created to help students better understand what they’re reading, and as the focus is on critical thinking rather than mere ‘talking,’ we’ve left out more obvious stems like ‘I agree…’ or ‘I disagree…’ or ‘I like…’ or ‘I dislike…’, etc. Opinions are useful…
Wearing an effortless smile and a crisp, gray suit with a cloth lapel flower, Tommy Nalls Jr. projects confidence. Which is the point. In a ballroom full of job candidates, no one wants to dance with a desperate partner. And, as badly as his district needs teachers, Nalls doesn’t want just any teacher. “They have to have this certain grit, that certain fight,” says Nalls, director of recruitment for Jackson Public Schools, in Mississippi’s capital…
Throughout 2022, the Biden administration urged schools to spend their $122 billion in federal recovery funds on tutoring to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said students who had fallen behind should receive at least 90 minutes of tutoring a week. Last summer, the White House put even more muscle behind the rhetoric and launched a “National Partnership for Student Success” with the goal of providing students with high…
Just as all students are different, so are all instructors. We need to ensure we are implementing instructional technology tools that fit our teaching style, availability, and technology skill level. If any instructor wishes to incorporate a new technology tool, it is vital we first assess the tool’s “goodness of fit” for both student population and course content. An instructional technology tool with a “goodness of fit” for a particular course and student group demonstrates…
U.S. teens spend more than eight hours a day on screens, and there’s growing concern over how social media and large amounts of screen time per day may be affecting their mental health. Now, a new study published by the American Psychological Association validates what some parents have experienced when their teenagers cut back: they seem to feel better about themselves. Perhaps you’ve seen this in your own kids when they return from summer camp…
The English Composition I course at New Jersey City University is designed to prepare students to meet the requirements of writing for university course work. The course learning objectives focus on the achievement of basic communicative skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Instead of completing a traditional essay or oral presentation as the signature assignment for the course, students were asked to build websites using skills honed over the course of the semester in…
