Help Students to Ultimately Succeed by Planning for Failure
High stakes assessments, IEP goals, summative assessments, extracurricular try outs, homework, the list goes on and on. From school age to adulthood, we are all faced with the challenge of achieving success. But what defines our success? Many state bureaucracies define success as achievement of SLOs, standardized test scores, SAT scores, etc. However, what truly defines any person’s success is their ability to learn from failure. Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure outlines ways by which parents and teachers can help students learn to fail. The importance of failure is not the act of failing, but how students learn from the failure. [...]
It’s the Most Unproductive Time of the Year!
Depending on the calendar year, the time from Thanksgiving and Christmas Day can be between 27 and 33 days. There are still two weeks between now and the holiday break. As a teacher, you cannot afford to lose these days to distractions. How then do you keep students focused during the most wonderful, and unproductive, time of the year? [...]
Volunteer this Holiday Season
Welcome to the month of December teachers! Chilly mornings and festive greetings can be found wherever you go this month. Last week’s Thanksgiving feast is now in the record books and with it we’re now officially in the Season of Giving. Now is a great time to create activities that can inspire your students to volunteer this holiday season and do some good in their communities.
To help reinforce this Season of Giving, December 5th was International Volunteer’s Day. Volunteering to help others kindles happiness (something the world can always use a bit more of.) Here are some jumping off points to get your students engaged with volunteering in their schools: [...]
Student Engagement = Student Success
Successful instruction demands the invested and active participation of both students and teachers. One of our primary goals as teachers is to avoid classrooms where students feel bored, dispassionate and effectively disengaged. A lack of student engagement is easy to see because we’ve all experienced it before. Doodling in notebooks, passing notes (or now texts) and the tried and true disengaging method of aimlessly staring out windows. As fellow educators could tell you, nothing is more deflating than a class of disinterested students. [...]
Top Ten Winter Lesson Plans
[wr_row][wr_column]Winter has come! With the warm weather officially behind us, it’s time look forward to the winter months and begin planning out lessons for the snowy, frigid days ahead. Below are ten unique lesson plans for students of all grades K thru 12. Covering a variety of topics, from science to social studies, this featured list will get any class moving once they get in from the cold! [...]
TeacherHUB – Thanksgiving – Family, Food, & Fun in Class
Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday season! Getting to sit down with relatives for the biggest meal of the year (and having a four-day weekend) has students excited for the fourth Thursday in November. The classroom should stay exciting, too! [...]
A Teacher’s Perspective: Turning To-Do List into Organized Plans
Debra Vaughn started using Planbook Plus in it’s Beta stage in the Fall of 2015. She has become a Power User since then and has been inputting plans for a 5 year Robotics course she is developing for her district. We wanted to share her experience of planning ahead with Planbook Plus with you. I’ve been [...]
Madeline Hunter Method & Planbook Plus
The Madeline Hunter Mastery Teaching method provides a scientific foundation for lesson design which includes various elements that foster an operational structure that can be used as a suggested outline for lesson planning. Planbook Plus has the ability to support this framework, featuring optional elements that align with the successful structural design created by Hunter. In addition to these optionally inclusive elements, the thousands of available eLearning lessons were designed to include comparable elements devised to amplify student learning. [...]
10 Reasons to Get Excited About Planbook Plus Master Planner
Love it or hate it, writing lesson plans is part of every teacher’s job. That’s true now more than ever, as schools work diligently to align their curricula to Common Core standards and evaluate teachers on a number of criteria — one of which is sure to be how well you craft a lesson and [...]
Summertime Lesson Planning
Individuals outside the realm of education joke about summers being the perfect reason to teach. Educator’s know that even though school may not be in session and teachers may not be in the classroom every day, their jobs are far from over. Once one school year ends, the planning for the next begins. Summertime presents an excellent opportunity to get a head start on updating lesson plans, reviewing areas to improve and organizing for the next year. Planbook Plus is the perfect tool to use to divide the workload through collaboration, enhance current plans and miss as little time in the sun as possible. [...]