The Thoughts of a Teacher

Are you a Sage on the Stage or Facilitator

There is a spectrum of teaching. On one end is the “sage on the stage”, and the other end is a “facilitator teacher”. Depending on what your level of teaching experience, your comfortably, or your continuously changing teaching style will depend on where on the teaching spectrum you are. Many middle school students may not respond to certain types of teaching. To be successful, your teaching…

Helping Introverts be seen and heard

In a class of twenty-five or so students, middle school teachers will be faced with a myriad of learning styles and personality traits, along with developing personalities. When a teacher looks over their classes, they have to figure out how to mold these individual students in a functioning class.

In any classroom certain students will generally stick out. The students who are extroverts, loud,…

Supporting Students who Are Gifted and Introverted

Gifted intervention specialists have their hands full. Having a class with students who are gifted with many of these students having personalities that range from introverted to extroverted. Students who are gifted have unique needs that need to be supported, such as being multipotentiality, having perfectionistic behaviors, being twice exceptional, or having underachievement behaviors.  Not…

Getting Middle School Kids Organized

Middle school is the first time many students change classes, and have multiple teachers for multiple subjects. Coming from an elementary self contained model, students can struggle. One aspect of middle school students are unorganized.

Middle school teachers spend can spend countless hours trying to get students organized. Middle school students often forget to turn in homework, and many times…

Are you Yeller McYellerson?

Are you a yeller? Does your voice carry? Do your students ignore you when you when you try to get them to settle  down? You may be a Yeller McYellerson.

Middle school students are loud. I am sure you got the memo, but I know some may not. We all know those teachers whose voice just carries even when they are using their inside voice.  For those teachers for the most part this post isn’t about…

School Uniforms vs. Education

Many schools have school uniforms as part of their board policy. Many of these schools are community schools, charter schools, non-public religious schools, and some are traditional public schools. I worked for public school districts that went from student choice of wardrobe to required student uniforms.

I understand the idea behind uniforms, and the sense of community it brings. The idea that…

Allowing Collaboration in the Gifted Classroom

What I love about students who are gifted is that many of them can be so creative, and think much differently than their average learner peers. Sometimes that creativity doesn’t always work well with others. Sometimes due to their unique social and emotional needs such as perfectionism, multi-potentiality, and others can sometimes make working with a partner or a small group difficult. 

As a…

Don’t Shut Your Freaking Door

The first thing many of middle school teachers do after our students have come into the classroom is to close the door. We are the captain of our ship, and we will decide when the door is open or closed to the outside world.

The problem with always having your door closed, is you are also closing yourself off to the rest of the teaching staff. Teaching is a team sport. As a middle school…

Why Submitting Weekly Lesson Plans is Irrelevant to Teaching

Early in my teaching career I would work on my lesson plans for the next week and make sure they were submitted on Fridays before I left for home. I would scour the standards I was to teach and prepare the lessons from them. I felt overworked, and soon felt overwhelmed with the idea that I had to have them finished and prepared for next week. It was a lot of work for something that I would end up…

The Middle School Classroom Environment is What you Make it

Every classroom has a feel. You can walk into several classrooms with students, desks, chairs, posters on the walls, but each has a different feel. Every classroom has their own environment. There are several factors as to why they are different.

The Teacher: The teacher sets the tone of the classroom. They are the ones whom students react to. If the teacher is controlling, dictator-like, or…

Questions, Answers, Opinions, and Stretch

Asking questions is art. Being able to ask the right questions is an art form. I was sitting in the doctor office this week, listening to him ask a multitude of questions to get to the heart of the health issue I was having. It occurred to me that this is what teaching and assessing is like in a classroom.

Questioning skills is one skill I felt like I had a handle on, but not necessarily…

One aspect of teaching a teacher must get into doing, particularly new teachers is creating a routine that is simple, and easy to maintain for the beginning of day, leaving and entering the classroom, and end of class/day routines. Middle school students desire routines. They will not admit it, but they know it is a good thing for them.

When I say that routines should be simple and easy to…

Life in the Middle

I have taught in a middle school setting for 18 years. Many days could be described a little like this: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

Middle school students are a unique age group, one that sometimes isn’t glamorized or wanted by many teachers. I always get a reaction when I tell someone who isn’t a teacher that I teach middle school. They tend to make a face of disdain…

Gifted Intervention Specialists Need to be a Visible Resource

The education pendulum has swung to side where collaboration and teacher teams are becoming more and more popular. Teacher based teams are the norm in many school districts across the country. These teacher based teams work to help improve curriculum and instruction for students in their classes.

As a gifted intervention specialist, I spent some time in some of these teach based teams giving…

Creating a Tribe Like Atmosphere in the Gifted Classroom

This week, I have started reading a book by Seth Godin titled Tribes: We need you to lead us. As I am reading this, I am thinking of all my friends who classroom teachers, not only just gifted intervention specialists. I find that many of the ideas that Seth is writing about can be applied to the classroom.

Seth writes that a tribe is “a group of people connected to one another, connected…

Before the start of the school year, I would always go through my class lists of students to see what I need to know about them. I would look to see if any students had an IEP or a 504 Plan. I would look to see which students were gifted. I also checked on other things such as allergies, and other medical issues. If I had time, I would check scores on past district wide and state tests. I did…

Teachers have a lot of responsibilities and protocols to get through in the beginning of the year. Compound that with teaching many classes and collecting data to effectively teach our children. General education teachers have a tough job. They are the front line of helping find and identify students who may have learning disabilities to gifted and talented. In order to properly identify these…