In this episode we dive into Whole Brain Teaching and why it's an awesome way to increase active learning and engagement.

Telling isn't teaching, and teaching doesn't always equal learning. Learning happens when our students are engaged, active thinkers. This comes down to the cognitive ratio in the classroom. Cognitive ratio is the balance between how much the teacher is working, talking, and thinking, vs how much the students are working, talking, and thinking. Trust us, we all want our students to be working harder than we are once the bell rings.

In this episode, we discuss lesson planning with subobjectives. Each subobjective is scaffolded with Bloom's Taxonomy (or DOK), and has its own gradual release cycle. This method can help students progress towards mastery of the final learning target. It also feels very quick and urgent! Follow for more!

With the Nation's Report Card, NAEP, released a few weeks ago we saw how academic acheivement dropped these past few years. Pandemic learning loss has also led to changes in attention span and focus. Attention spans have been decreasing for years but HOW students pay attention has also changed. More multi-tasking, split attention, and divided focus has become normal and we may all need to learn to adapt to this new normal.

On today's episode we discuss why you should write your test before you start teaching your unit. When we're truly UbD (Understanding by Design) planners, our tests should be written before the first day of the unit...but how many of us do that? It's one of those teaching habits we know we should be doing. There's been many times when we've written our test a few days before the assessment when we know it should have been written at the beginning of the unt. We discuss why on today's Morning Duty.

On this Friday morning we discuss how excellence sheets are a high quality spiraled review page and we talk about ways to feedback to students that is both warm and honest.

Mesa Public Schools comes up with an innovative way to handle the teacher shortage...team teaching large groups of kids! Plus why Ben Franklin's refusal to finance a church bell led to summer vacation. Thank you for listening to Morning Duty.

Happy Wednesday! We're sharing some of the most interesting data we've learned about the earnings of Teachers Pay Teachers and its most successful sellers, as well as a new way to support executive functioning and student organization.

Happy Taco Tuesday! What if we had mandatory substitute duty like we do jury duty? We also chat about a new way to build anchor charts for the room. Come along with us for morning duty!

In this episode we look at how Ben Franklin used a tongue-in-cheek article to introduce daylight savings to the Parisians and how educator Sam Balto made coming to school greener with his weekly "bike bus."