A Principal's Reflections
APRIL 27, 2025
" Trust isn't built through grand gesturesit's earned in the quiet moments where consistency, honesty, and empathy align." Writers block is real, especially if you have been blogging for as long as I have (15 years). Going back and reflecting on past posts through my podcast has enabled me to explore new angles on, in my mind, very important topics and concepts.
TeachThought
MAY 4, 2025
Here are 30 ideas to promote creativity in learning, including tapping into multiple intelligences and using emotional connections.
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Cult of Pedagogy
JANUARY 19, 2025
Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo ( transcript ): Sponsored by Wix Tomorrow and Brisk Teaching This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, Cult of Pedagogy will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. As I considered how to introduce this post, I started by looking for statistics that could paint a picture of where modern-day students are with their reading skills.
NCHE
FEBRUARY 7, 2025
Hello teachers. Im reaching out today as a fellow educator and historian, and as Executive Director of the National Council for History Education, to affirm your professionalism and the importance of your role as history educators. As you know, history is not the past its the study of the past. We, and our students, make sense of individuals, groups, and events by studying primary sources and the work of scholars.
World History Teachers Blog
FEBRUARY 22, 2025
The Guardian has a terrific interactive site about the global nature of World War I. It has interactive maps, original news reports, and videos exploring the war and its effects from many perspectives. Ten historians give a brief history of the war through global lenses in a video that takes the viewer through the war. My colleague and I put together a hyperdoc that takes students through the site and helps them understand the global nature of the war.
The Hechinger Report
JANUARY 13, 2025
A trio of researchers argues that it’s unclear where students with disabilities learn the most and recommends that teachers and parents focus first on interventions students need. Credit: Getty images A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion.
ED Surge
FEBRUARY 19, 2025
Reading fluency the ability to read accurately, automatically and with appropriate expression remains a critical yet often overlooked component of literacy development. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 68 percent of U.S. students are not reading at proficient levels. By fourth grade, students transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Social Studies Network brings together the best content for social studies educators from the widest variety of thought leaders.
Passion for Social Studies
APRIL 12, 2025
All teachers would probably agree that adding some strategically placed videos to your lessons can really enhance the experience for your students. Short, to-the-point videos that are seamlessly integrated into a lecture or activity can have a huge impact. This is especially true in AP Government , where students face dense content, abstract theories, and a mountain of required cases and documents.
Sapiens
MARCH 11, 2025
An anthropologist plunges into the world of Patagonian heavy metal music in Argentina to explore how the genre relates to language and cultural revitalization. I FIRST HEARD Patagonian heavy metal on a cold winter night in Esquel, Argentina. The song roared to life with guitar riffs and drumming resembling a U.S. or European thrash metal record. But around the 35-second mark, unfamiliar wind instruments grabbed my attention.
Strange Maps
MAY 5, 2025
The mountains of northern Laos are beautiful, but tough to negotiate. By car, it can easily take 15 hours to drive the 373 miles (600 km) of winding roads that separate the capital Vientiane from the town of Boten on the Chinese border. Since December 2021, theres a far straighter, much faster alternative: the brand-new high-speed Laos- China Railway (LCR) measures just 257 miles (414 km) between Boten and Vientiane, and fast trains cover that distance in three and a half hours.
A Principal's Reflections
MARCH 2, 2025
" The future doesn't need us to memorize its answers; it needs us to master the art of asking better questions." The future won't wait for us to catch up; it will demand that we've already anticipated its needs, making future-proofing learning not a luxury but the very oxygen of survival. Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed this topic in detail after revisiting a blog post I wrote in 2021.
TeachThought
MAY 6, 2025
Critical thinking questions include, Why is this important? What are the causes and effects of this? How do we know if this is true?
Cult of Pedagogy
FEBRUARY 16, 2025
Listen to my interview with Blake Harvard ( transcript ): Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Brisk Teaching This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?
Teaching Anthropology
APRIL 10, 2025
Sherry Fukuzawa, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the elephant in the room in every classroom. However, this is even more of a concern in online courses. Unlike in-person assessment methods, it is difficult if not impossible to control student reliance on AI to support (if not write) online assignments and tests.
World History Teachers Blog
FEBRUARY 12, 2025
Atlantic Magazine published 45 black and white stunning black-and-white photographs of the interwar period around the world. Among the 45 images are Hitler and Mussolini shaking hands in Germany, Japanese aircraft carrying out air raids over China, Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek sitting with the chairman of the Yunan provincial government, and four Italian soldiers taking aim in Ethiopia in 1935.
The Hechinger Report
FEBRUARY 4, 2025
Theres a half-billion-dollar federal program that is supposed to help students with disabilities get into the workforce when they leave high school, but most parents and even some school officials dont know it exists. As a result, hundreds of thousands of students who could be getting help go without it. New Jersey had the nations lowest proportion roughly 2 percent of eligible students receiving these services in 2023.
ED Surge
MARCH 27, 2025
One of the perks of Angie Adams job at Samsung is that every year, she gets to witness how some of the countrys most talented emerging scientists are tackling difficult problems in creative ways. Theyre working on AI tools that can recognize the signs of oncoming panic attacks for kids on the autism spectrum in one case, and figuring out how drones can be used effectively to fight wildfires in another.
Digital Promise
MAY 7, 2025
The post Student Agency and Academic Growth: A Case Study From Sylvan Hills Middle School appeared first on Digital Promise.
Passion for Social Studies
JANUARY 11, 2025
Students learn about such a wide range of politics in high school history classes. While some courses are about foreign countries, others focus on what is happening in the United States. This means students learn about important leaders and policies that have drastically shaped the United States into the country it is today. For example, teaching Nixon is a crucial aspect of American history due to his leadership, insights, and evolution of politics.
Sapiens
FEBRUARY 26, 2025
The Roti Collective, a community-based research project, explores the layered histories that brought a flatbread from the Indian subcontinent around the world. THE PERFECT BITE Roti, an unleavened flatbread, originated with ancient peoples of the Indus River Valley on the Indian subcontinent. Known by many names, including chapati and parotta, roti and the practice of roti-making has traveled the globe to become a culinary mainstay across many foodways in the Global South.
Zinn Education Project
JANUARY 8, 2025
The climate crisis is not in some distant future. It is being felt around the world with heatwaves, floods, and most dramatically with the wildfires in Southern California. Our hearts go out to the residents who face the tragic loss of lives, homes, and entire communities. #TeachClimateJustice : Invite students to listen to news about the fires and come up with their own terms for the disaster, such as fossil-fueled disaster or climate change disaster.
A Principal's Reflections
MAY 11, 2025
Professional learning is an embedded element of every district and school, but the focus is usually on teachers. Leaders deserve support as well. Recently, on Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed the value of job-embedded and ongoing coaching for administrators backed by research after revisiting blog posts I wrote in 2018 and 2021. Listen on Spotify or wherever you access your favorite podcasts.
TeachThought
MAY 2, 2025
Where To Find Sensory Teaching Tools For Your Classroom In a world full of stimuli, sensory rooms are becoming an essential tool for schools looking to better s
Cult of Pedagogy
FEBRUARY 2, 2025
Listen to the interview with Amanda Morin and Emily Kircher-Morris ( transcript ): Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Brisk Teaching This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?
Teaching Anthropology
FEBRUARY 3, 2025
Chloe Beckett, M.A., Nightingale College, South Dakota, US As I grade my Cultural Anthropoloy classs Emic and Etic Perspectives of Halloween essay, two things strike me: 1. How often I write the comment Capitalize proper nouns, and 2. How the Turnitin AI scores keep creeping higher and higher. For anyone who has been teaching anthropology over the last two years, the latter will be of no surprise to you.
World History Teachers Blog
JANUARY 16, 2025
This MIT site " Visualizing Cultures ," is a great resource for World History and AP World when studying imperialism. The site includes outstanding visual narratives on which curriculum units are based. Most of the curriculum units ask students to analyze various images. Some of the units include the rise and fall of the Canton Trade System and the First Opium War.
The Hechinger Report
MARCH 2, 2025
By now, you may have seen the recent spate of articles bemoaning the plight of the novel, that outdated 18th-century technology that adults have long forsaken and that some schools are beginning to shrug off. The best case against novels goes something like this: Theyre long, students dont read them outside of class, and they should make way for other aspects of instruction.
ED Surge
JANUARY 27, 2025
Education in the 21st century is obsessed with assessing children, attempting to measure every aspect of their intelligence, learning and growth. Yet we are not, according to Isabelle Hau, measuring what matters: relationships. Theres a disconnect between what we know is really critical and then what were paying attention to, says Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of a new book about the essential role of relationships in healthy human development.
Thrive in Grade Five
MARCH 9, 2025
It’s a fact of life, when you assign work or projects in social studies class, you’ll have early finishers. What should you do with them? Let them hang out and talk? Ummm, no, that’s just asking for classroom management nightmares. When you fail to set procedures for students, they’ll create their own procedures 100% of the time, so make sure students know what assignments they must complete and what they are able to do once finished with their required work.
Passion for Social Studies
MAY 9, 2025
Sociology gives students a powerful framework to understand the world around them. It opens the door to exploring different societies, their diversity, and the ways they interact. This is why I love teaching sociology! I have found that one of the most effective ways to deepen student understanding is through well-chosen sociology documentaries; textbooks and lectures can only take you so far.
Sapiens
JANUARY 29, 2025
A paleontologist journeys through Indonesias Riau Archipelago in search of Homo erectus remains, but uncovers how environmental devastation has erased much of the regions history. FROM THE AIR, endless rows of palm trees swallowed the topography as we flew over Bintan Island in the South China Sea. On the ground, an occasional fallen palm tree and piles of red palm fruit scattered along the roadsides.
Moler's Musing
JANUARY 24, 2025
This week in 8th-grade social studies, we brought history to life with engaging EduProtocols that helped students dive deep into the Early Republic and key moments like the Whiskey Rebellion. From Sketch and Tell-O activities that broke down complex ideas to Progressive Sketch and Tell timelines that visualized historical events, we kept creativity at the forefront.
A Principal's Reflections
APRIL 13, 2025
Who doesn't look forward to PD days? While some educators do, I have the feeling that many of you cringe at the thought. Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed the pitfalls of professional development (PD) after revisiting a blog post I wrote in 2021. Listen on Spotify or wherever you access your favorite podcasts. You can also read the original blog post HERE.
TeachThought
MARCH 23, 2025
Reading strategies useful in every content area include Questioning the text, Visualization, and using Context Clues to infer meaning.
Cult of Pedagogy
JANUARY 8, 2025
Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Alpaca and Brisk Teaching Every January for the last ten years, we have chosen a small collection of tech tools we think are worth checking out. That will be the same this year. But something else will be different: Traditionally, when we put out this list, we do it to coincide with the release of our annual Teacher’s Guide to Tech.
Teaching Anthropology
MARCH 10, 2025
Cristina Abbatangelo, Brendan Newton, Ellie Wan, University of Toronto, Canada The experiential learning course FSC485: Professional Opportunity in Forensic Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) provides upper-year students a unique opportunity to engage in self-directed professional forensic experiences that enhance their career readiness.
World History Teachers Blog
MARCH 8, 2025
Here is a Cold War Stations activity that I use with my AP World students when we cover the Cold War. One of my colleagues developed it years ago. It includes seven stations, each with cartoons, documents, or photographs for students to process. I printed it out for seven different stations, but students could also work on it online. Here's a google link to the handout that students complete.
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