MWSubstack 024: Innovative Teaching

Challenge yourself to try something new with this cross-curricular collection of articles from the MiddleWeb archives.

Welcome to MiddleWeb Substack. It’s a twice-monthly, topical, five-minute read for middle grades educators, featuring a selection of MiddleWeb’s most popular and influential articles, a book review, and a noteworthy 4-8 resource or project we’ve spotted. That’s it!

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►INNOVATIVE TEACHING
Ready for something new? Sample these ideas.

In one of our favorite "innovative teaching" articles, Gravity Goldberg proposes that teachers spend as much time co-exploring with their students as they do serving as a tour guide. She includes an actual schedule teachers might use to make this happen, offering a month-long book study unit as an example. Ambitious? Yes! Innovative? You decide. Below we've shared 10 more articles that might encourage you to try something new.

“I Can’t Hear You with All of Your Talking”
Educators tend to fill every moment with our voices, writes teaching coach Patty McGee. Yet the most powerful learning can happen when we are silent, making room for student-to-student communication, customized feedback, and a trusted space for students to reveal what they know.

6 Ways to Help Students Soak Up Difficult Texts
To make sure social studies content reading is accessible to all of her students, no matter their level of reading when they arrive, Megan Kelly has added strategies to her literacy toolbox to create entry points for everyone. See the six activities she’s developed so far.

Spark Mathematical Creativity with These Ideas
The use of open-ended, visual tasks is a very non-traditional way of teaching and learning math. But its potential for expanding students’ mathematical creativity and understanding makes it well worth exploring! Math education consultant Jerry Burkhart shares examples.

Using Talk about Texts to Grow Conversation Skills
Are students who increasingly communicate through bits of digital text missing the chance to develop live conversation skills? In her middle grades classroom, Nancy Costanzo has crafted strategies to help kids both deepen their understanding and become skilled conversationalists.

How to Fill Your Class with Joyful Learning
Students experience deep, joyful learning in classrooms where there is an ongoing cycle of responsive teaching, says literacy expert Regie Routman. The ultimate goal is to grow passionate learners who self-monitor, self-direct, and set their own worthwhile goals.

Use Music and Exercise to Teach Math Fluency
Without good math fact recall, many students become discouraged about building math knowledge and solving equations. Kathleen Palmieri uses song and movement to engage fifth graders in computation fluency. Watch the music and exercise videos that are hits with her kids.

7 Ways to Help Students Become Active Listeners
In classrooms filled with conversations, oral instructions, and academic vocabulary, poor listening skills can drastically limit learning. Curtis Chandler shares seven simple activities educators can use to help students become active listeners who know more and retain more.

Complex Tasks Every Student Can Accomplish
Collaborating on complex tasks builds relationships, a positive classroom culture for learning, and a sense of accomplishment for each student. When the team wins, everyone is a winner! Deep learning expert Karin Hess shares tools to create authentic, time-sensitive projects.

Using Mood and Imagery to Engage Kids with Text
Whether they are fiction or nonfiction, the best stories are told through mood as we react to events, people and emotions. For students, identifying, tracking and exploring moods in stories and images is an easy way to enter into text. Teacher-author Trevor Bryan shares his colorful approach.

Try This UDL Higher Order Thinking Strategy
Teachers Samantha Layne and Susanne Croasdaile introduce a new UDL-friendly tool to promote higher thinking in any subject, using a model-building strategy. TPRY helps students break down visual content, analyze it, and even build their own visual texts. See a food web modeling example from science class.

WATCH FOR OUR 2ND SERIES of innovative teaching articles later this school year!

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Regie Routman “believes that we are most fully ourselves when ‘teaching, learning, and living are interwoven and seamlessly integrated.’ To show us this full self, she shares stories that might help us navigate our own worlds.“ – Read Sarah Cooper’s review of The Heart-Centered Teacher.

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►ELSEWHERE
Jump into innovation at Edutopia.

Tucked away on the Edutopia website is a powerful launching pad with the plain-vanilla headline, Core Strategies for Innovation and Reform in Learning. Jump there and discover portals to resources about six transformational strategies. You might try out the Integrated Studies link. It opens to a curated display of tempting articles. (Watch for the red tag indicating 6-8 Middle School posts.)

►OUR BOOK REVIEW
50 Strategies for Supporting Multilingual Learners. By Mandy Manning.

Former NTOY Mandy Manning’s book is essential reading for teachers new to the world of language diversity and would be a great PD resource for general ed teachers and staff. Teacher Jeanette Pine finds the book clear, concise, easy to navigate, and filled with important reminders about effective practice. Read the complete review.

►NEXT TIME:
We'll join you in a holiday break and then pick up the action as the new year begins with two intertwined topics: motivation and risk aversion. Get some rest!