I try to spend a good chunk of time each month visiting schools and shadowing teachers, looking for the systems and tricks folks use to make their buildings more “Together.” This post will kick off a series of Together Tricks on the little…
We teachers are always trying to make our classrooms more efficient—and less expensive! I recently visited several great schools in Brooklyn where I spotted multiple uses for blue painter’s masking tape. Check out the mileage you can get…
Not only do you have students to keep track of, colleagues to meet with, and administrators to manage, but there’s another HUGELY important group of people who require your attention—the families of your students! Some of you are fortunate…
Thanks so much, everyone, for your awesome entries in our Desk Survival Kit Contest! Our lucky winners (also announced in last week’s Newsletter) are. . . Arsheen M. from Michigan! Arsheen is returning to her work as a first grade teacher…
Dear Maia, I’m a middle school language arts teacher, and it has gotten increasingly complicated to keep track of my students’ writing over my decade of teaching. Some students want to write by hand. Others want to draft on laptops or…
E-mail. . . You may have noticed its absence as a topic on our blog. This is not because e-mail isn’t a big deal — in fact, we have an entire book chapter devoted to it. But I know that once we open the e-mail can of worms, well, there is no…
Most of us are heavily focused on teaching various routines to our students at the start of the school year: how to enter the classroom, how to hand in homework, procedures for using bathroom passes, ways to get classwork if absent, etc. We invest…
It happens to all of us. You have the best intentions to be “Together,” and then, something happens. You get sick, you travel all weekend, a friend pays you a surprise visit, you watch too many episodes of Homeland (ummmm. . ….