The National PTA Is Ready to Help You Thank Your Teachers During Teacher Appreciation Week
“It’s in these challenging times that we truly recognize and appreciate how our nation’s educators play such a pivotal role in our children’s lives—inspiring a lifelong love of learning and discovery and making a difference in their well-being and long-term success.” Read more
The Student Research Foundation (SRF) surveyed high school teachers nationwide about their satisfaction on 14 job-related factors. (See infographic below.) 2,385 responded during Fall 2018. The data, collected pre-Covid, provide insights into teachers’ willingness to rally after schools closed and possible impacts of any Covid-induced budget cuts on learning environments. Read more
Research Findings . . .
If you are a teacher, you know how exciting it is to hear one of your students say, “I want to become a teacher someday.”
Those words tell you that a lot of things have gone right with that student’s education. He or she finds learning exciting, believes in the classroom experience, wants to give something back to the world by teaching young people . . . and also admires you and the work you are doing.
Those are all great messages to be getting from a student you have influenced.
Most teachers give only written notes to students about the work and projects they have turned in. Written feedback is certainly better than no feedback at all. But according to “How to Give Your Students Feedback with Technology,” an article that instructional designers Holly Fiock and Heather Garcia published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, giving feedback in video, audio and other formats can be far more effective than giving written comments alone. Read more
A college professor we know tells us, “Sometimes I think that nothing I can do will generate the slightest amount of enthusiasm from my lecture classes . . . If I stood on the lab table in the front of the room, lit the Bunsen Burner and waved it around over my head, I don’t think even that would do the trick.” Read more
Sometimes parents ask teachers to stretch ethical boundaries in ways that seem “small,” like this . . .
“My daughter has never gotten a B on a science test, and you just gave her one,” a mother told a teacher during a tense phone call. “I want you to let her retake the exam, but first I want you to go over the questions she got wrong.”
And sometimes parents make demands that are clearly unethical, like this . . .
“You gave my son a C in physics last term,” a father told a high school teacher. “How did that compare to the median grade you gave to all the students in the class? I want you to increase it to a B.” Read more
If you’re a teacher, do you know what is going on in the minds of your students? What motivates them to learn? As you know, some students are extremely motivated to learn, while others are only concerned with earning a passing grade. What is going on? Read more
As a high school teacher, you are devoting time and energy to your professional development. But are you also striving to become a more creative teacher?
We recently found a new post, “101 Ways for Teachers to Be More Creative” that was published on July 31, 2019 on the TeachThought blog. This post really does offer 101 suggestions for how teachers can become more creative. Read more
It’s only natural for high school teachers to feel a special affection for former students, and to feel a sense of loss when they leave for college.
As educator Jill Eulberg writes on the Hey Teach blog:
“Spending as much time as we do together, our classes can bond like families, and students can start to feel like our own kids. But when it comes time for them to move on to the next grade, the next school, or the next step in their lives, it can be hard to know the best way to stay in touch with students.” Read more
If you walk into a typical American high school and stand outside a classroom where technical subjects are taught, chances are that everything looks like it is humming along beautifully. Eager students come into the classroom in time for their classes to begin, where a knowledgeable and experienced teacher takes up a position at the front of the classroom. And in communities with sufficient funding, everyone is able to start working on computers and other equipment that facilitate the learning process. Read more