I receive a fair number of questions and comments from teachers at the college level. No surprise, really. Teaching at a collegiate or university setting is different, obviously, so of course not every idea from K-12 teaching would apply, but then again teaching is teaching–which is to say, challenging–and one of the themes I hear from…
Show Call is one of my favorite teaching techniques. It’s essentially a visible Cold Call. You assign a written task and then, when it’s done, choose an example or two and project to the class. I love how it puts student work at the center of the classroom, making it visible and tangible so everyone can…
A couple of weeks ago I shared a picture of Jo Facer at Michaela school. She’d used a list of sophisticated verbs that added depth and nuance to discussion about what a text “showed” to expand her students vocabulary and precision when discussing texts. The idea resonated with lots of folks so I am happy to…
It’s hard to find a teacher who doesn’t make reference to Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s part of the language of teaching. For those who aren’t familiar with it here’s some background from Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching: In 1956, Benjamin Bloom … published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework…
This is my third of three posts about “common opportunities” to make good classrooms more rigorous. I posted last week about replacing “agree or disagree” prompts with something more nuanced like “develop,” and about making it clear to students how you wan them to participate in class. Today’s idea is making the reworking of ideas—verbally and…