Years ago, while on a plane heading home from a work meeting, I had the entire row to myself and time to think. Several ideas emerged about learning from the past but I did not have paper. As such, I jotted down notes on an “air sickness bag.” Hopefully, you just laughed, but those thoughts …
With Thanksgiving this week, the school year will accelerate rapidly to close the calendar year and first semester. Right now, thoughts are already turning to academic or instructional changes needed for the second semester. To help, the Stride Professional Development Center will give you some ideas about how questions shape direction. If we are honest, …
For too long, educators have viewed phones and social media as a distraction in the classroom and failed to realize how they can be used as instructional tools. Phones and social media are places where students exist, so why not use them in a productive way? This blog will show you how to implement social …
Children in school who have epilepsy face significant impacts. Because these students have seizures that bring unwanted attention to them, they often feel misunderstood as they are not invited to parties, avoided by their peers, or even out-right bullied by others. When these social circumstances occur, the epileptic student struggles with isolation, helplessness, anxiety, and …
November is Epilepsy Awareness Month, and the Stride Professional Development Center wants to provide basic information for teachers and school leaders. The National Epilepsy Foundation (NEF) has graciously provided information that helps define epilepsy and shares figures to reveal its prevalence in schools. Epilepsy, according to NEF, is a disorder of the brain that could …
The Stride Professional Development Center is proud to announce the launch of a new content series focused on the fundamentals of Project Based Learning (PBL). This series provides teachers strategies and tips for guiding students through active engagement, real-world problem-solving, and personally relevant projects. This series was created with a wide audience in mind. Veteran …
Many, if not most, schools are out of school on Veteran’s Day (November 11), but do your students know why they are not in school? This short blog will bring clarity and offer ideas for teaching students the importance of this day away from school. Before getting to the instructional ideas, we need to pause …
Previously, the Stride Professional Development Center shared the first steps to establishing classroom norms for collaborative projects. These steps included naming individual needs, sharing with the group, asking for clarity, and creating consensus with a group contract. This blog continues that theme by exploring how the contract serves as a planning guide with a focus …
Establishing Norms to Promote Collaboration in PBL Read More »
Knowing that students learn better when the learn together, the Stride Professional Development Center offers suggestions to create stronger collaborative conversations and thus, an increase in student engagement and achievement. It all begins with the foundation for successful teamwork. While teaching at a school that chose to embrace Project Based Learning (PBL), my principal shared …
PBL Collaborative Discourse – Avoiding the Drift Read More »
I absolutely love everything science-related and will do science for fun in my free time. In starting to teach high school science, my hope was to build student excitement about all these amazing science concepts. Classes were not going to be dry with mind-numbing lectures, and students would have fun interacting with the material, applying …
