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  •  When a student asked me to lecture more, I was surprised.  She explained that sometimes she just wants the teacher to explain.  She was struggling to pick up the material from readings.  I do not like to lecture BUT I have learned that my personal distaste for the lecture format does not meet the needs of all my students. Some students benefit from hearing the information out loud.  If you are like me and aren't a great lecturer, or even if you are, here are my 5 tips for the lecture:





  • Provide support for note-taking:  I like to give my students three choices for notes, whether they use interactive notebooks or not: fill-in, outline and on your own.  Some students need more support than others when it comes to notes.  Fill-in notes can be a great help. 

    The notes are aligned to the presentation so that students easily can follow along.  It helps with focus and content.  A blank outline with headers and sub-headers supports students who are a little more savvy in their note-taking. 

    This is a great tool for students as they get closer to college.  Some students are ready to take notes on their own.  They create their own note structure.  Either way it is student choice.
  • Go visual:  Try not to just talk.  A quick slide deck can help students visualize the material and keep their interest.  I like to add pictures, arrows, and even animations.  

  • Keep it short: Limit the lecture to 10 minutes.  First, you are likely to go over the ten minutes.  Short lectures keep students' interest.  
  • Encourage interaction: a lecture can be a discussion as well.  Incorporate questions into your presentation to get students reflecting on the content immediately. How does the content relate to events today?  What do they notice about realism?  Make sure the questions are open-ended and not just an assessment.  This is just to get students thinking about the content.  Ask students if they have questions.
  • Reinforce the content:  follow the brief lecture with an activity to reinforce the content. 

    Perhaps students go on a gallery walk or begin a newspaper project that will cover material from a series of lectures or perhaps students create a poster on the content or even keep it simple with a reflective writing activity.  Customize the activity to the content.  
Lecture, even on a limited basis, is still a struggle for me but I can see the benefits for my students.  Ultimately, it is about making it work for you.
Most of us don't want to start over.  As we switch to distance learning, we are trying to balance our students' mental well-being with their academic needs.  To that end I am thinking about what I had already planned to do for the last two months of the year versus what is realistic.  Since, I don't know how long we will be doing distance learning, I am planning for finishing the school year remotely.  I HOPE to see my students in our classroom to finish the year, but who knows?  
Some changes I have made already:

  • Instead of having a final exam, I am giving students a project.
  • We will have one more exam (open note, open book)
  • All quizzes are now open note, open book
  • Independent student notebooks occur at home are followed by in-person discussions
  • Altering some of the content pieces to make distance learning more feasible.  For example instead of focusing on specific new content which is difficult for some of my new students to access, I am focusing more on skills such as writing, analysis, and synthesis.
  • Changing collaborative activities to independent projects
It's this last one that I will discuss specifically in this post: changing a collaborative activity/project to an independent project.

As we move into a period of distance learning across the world, I am sharing both digital and pen and paper ideas.   Today, I share one of the easiest activities to take out of the classroom and send home.  You can use it in math, social studies, and science (although I haven't tried it).  I call it graffiti.  I used to call it the doodle because it was inspired by the Google doodles but some teachers use doodle notes which can make it confusing.  In English they do a similar activity which they call the one-pager, often for a novel students have read.    Basically, graffiti is the summary and analysis of a topic.  It's great for assessment or review or ongoing analysis.

In this new (hopefully very temporary) reality where the majority of students have entered distance learning environments, lots of advice is being thrown out there.  Some people suggest giving students low level work that they can complete with little or no help.  Some believe that activities should be simple.   While there is a place for some of that, I respectfully disagree and encourage you to keep students challenge and engaged by skipping the worksheet.  This is EXACTLY the time for projects.  

How often in your traditional classroom do you think a project would just take too much time or too much space?  But now you have students stuck at home with more time than they ever had.  Students have time to think about a topic, investigate, analyze, and unleash their creativity!  Read on for tips to take projects offline with your students.

One of the challenges teachers and students are facing right now is a long lag time for teachers to give feedback.  For many teachers they will have little to no direct contact with their students during these long months of school closure.  While I personally have several projects planned for students, I have to balance the projects with skill-based activities.   This includes notes and self-checking problem activities.  Here's three of my favorite to send home with my students, each of which can replace a worksheet or problem set:
As the education world adapts to finishing the school year offline, you may be struggling to keep students engaged while teaching remotely.  In this post I show you how to take one traditional lesson offline and leave you with 5 tips for adapting a traditional lesson into a remote learning experience.

As I wrote about in 7 tips for teaching in a remote environment, this is an excellent opportunity for projects.  Projects can be time-consuming in the traditional classroom setting.  I hear more often than not from my colleagues that they want to try projects but when?  This is the time.  Here's what my AP Statistics students will be doing with linear regression:

Our school is closed.  The teaching staff is working on solutions so that students still get the education they need but we can keep everyone safe for public health reasons.  In an ideal world, schools stay open even when disaster strikes, but these are unprecedented times.    

Remote instruction, online or otherwise, presents its own challenges.  How do you keep students engaged?  How do you generate material for students to work on their own?  How do you stay connected to students?   Here's 7 tips to get you started:

The Civil Rights movement is an interesting era.  My students argue that we are in a new period of the movement or that the movement never ended.  For the purpose of this post, I’m referring to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. I’ve written about this era here and here. It is one of my favorite eras to explore with students in part because of its relevancy.  

A key theme in our study is an examination of where we are today.  We focus on three major groups that we have already discussed as part of our Civil Rights study: African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, and women. Students can advocate for other groups such as gays, but they need to be prepared to do extra research to identify how rights changed or didn’t from the 1950s and 60s to today. 

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I am a research policy advocate, educator, curriculum developer, author, PhD, amateur chef and of course, ultra marathon runner. I am deeply passionate about helping every student have the best opportunity to find their passions and develop their skills.

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