"The one-room schoolhouse was a place where a single educator faced the daily challenge of teaching to meet the needs of all students. Learner characteristics like age, cultural background, cognitive ability, and physical challenges did not separate students into different spaces and different places. The teacher negotiated all of these variables within a single room." (source)

The National Association for Elementary School Principals (NAESP)'s annual conference kicks off in two weeks in Long Beach, CA (June 30-July 2). Each year the conference, designed for educators on the "front lines," challenges leaders to think, what's next? Attendees can choose their conference focus from several tracks:

Imagine if educators were required by law to hand out straitjackets to students before school started. There's no filibuster long enough that could save any lawmaker from the angry mob of parents and teachers that would follow. But where's the public outcry when that immobilizing jacket is invisible? Students' ears are constantly being fed with information, and their eyes are getting their fill, too. But without the use of kinesthetic tactics in teaching, retention rates among students plummet.

On a chilly Monday in Minneapolis, two women shared their dynamic experiences in education to an at-capacity Icehouse, a unique venue for this month's EDTalks.

One of the cornerstones of teaching ELL students is vocabulary. Vocabulary is not only vital to reading,writing, speaking, and listening, but also to understanding broader concepts and making connections between subjects. The introduction of these new words and phrases are usually well received by students, but difficulties can arise in terms of retention. We recently attended the national Title I conference in Salt Lake City, and noticed that a number of sessios focused on engaging students, and specifically sessions on engaging ELL students to help them retain content. Joanne Billingsly, in her presentation "Making Content Sticky," outlined ways to build academic vocabulary and increase retention among ELL students: "The availability of color illustrations and teaching diagrams that support student understanding and retention of new words."

"The Cutout Maker has been one of the best resources to use as a teacher-to-be." Freed-Hardeman University, a private liberal arts university in Henderson, Tennessee, supports its students pursuing education degrees in a unique way by providing them hands-on teaching and learning tools. Because of the school's committment to future educators, it was selected as this month's VariQuest Super School! We spoke with Sarah Ridinger, a Librarian at Freed-Hardeman’s Learning Resource Library. This library itself is a unique collaboration between the university’s library and the School of Education, and part of its mission is to "ensure Education students and faculty have library resources to successfully learn and teach.”

Open Educational Resources, or OERs, have been around since the 1990s, however current technology has propelled OERs to the mainstream. Because the structure of the educational system is by nature exclusive, the ultimate goal of open educational resources is to make high-quality education available for any person to access at no cost. Because of revolutionary technologies of knowledge delivery, the world is closer to this point than at any other time.

Every class has students who read at different paces, and students with dyslexia often work harder than their classmates to decode the words on a page. Visual aids for dyslexia don't replace reading instruction, but they can make lessons easier to follow and give students a clear reference to come back to. Below, we cover why visual supports help, six tools you can use across subjects, how they fit with multisensory learning, and how the same approach supports students who struggle with math. Key takeaways Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability, not a vision problem. Visual aids support explicit, structured reading instruction; they don't replace it. Graphic organizers, anchor charts, manipulatives, visual schedules, flashcards, and reading tools give students with dyslexia structure and reference points they can use on their own. Many of the same visual supports, such as number lines, place value charts, and manipulatives, also help students who struggle with math.

Republished with permission from Melissa Hughes, Ph.D. Original article posted on December 2, 2014 There has been a lot of buzz lately around the maker movement. Recent brain-based research support the notion that hands-on making, building, and creating not only nurture creativity, but also impact cognition, working memory, and innovative problem solving. While we don’t have to have the working knowledge of neuroscientists, if we're going to improve our practice of teaching it's important to understand how the brain learns.

The weeks leading up to winter break can be chaotic in any classroom. Here are 8 teacher-created ecards for a bit of comedic relief: