Choice and Voice: A Must-Have! Student choice and voice are widely valued concepts in schools today, but what does voice actually look and sound like in practice? Choice is relatively easy to conceptualize. Students may have choices about when they complete work, with whom they collaborate, where they work in the classroom, or how they […]
By guest blogger Nicole Koch The Power of Perseverance Are our classrooms designed to make perseverance possible, or are we unintentionally rescuing students from the struggle that helps them grow? Perseverance is not a personality trait students either have or lack. It is a skill, built through repeated opportunities to encounter challenge, experience temporary uncertainty, […]
Student behavior can disrupt learning, but behavior itself is rarely the root issue. What educators are often witnessing in moments of challenge is dysregulation: a nervous system that has exceeded its current capacity to manage emotion, attention, sensory input, or cognitive demand. When dysregulation is treated as misbehavior, responses tend to focus on compliance. When […]
Students with disabilities in self-contained classrooms have a right to have access to the general-education curriculum. But how? An 8th-grade student who is learning to decode words and skip-count by 2s could not possibly perform at the level of those in general-education classrooms! The keyword here is access. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) […]
If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem If you want to engage students, offer them a real-world problem to solve! (See my blog: “If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem.”) A compelling problem will drive them into the curriculum; they’ll have a “felt need” to learn! And in our technologically advanced world, they […]