Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
Ruth Culham’s Teach Writing Well: How to Assess Writing, Invigorate Instruction, and Rethink Revision made me want to become an even more active writing teacher, one who encourages students… Continue reading
Imagine that the ever changing world is your curriculum. That is the way it is for social studies teachers. History changes each day – from local news to news of the world. The job of a social studies teacher is… Continue reading
Four years ago, I made a huge shift in daily classroom practice: I started talking about current events just about every day in my eighth-grade U.S. history classroom.I procrastinated making the change because… Continue reading
Leafing through Regie Routman’s Literacy Essentials feels not so much like reading a book as like having coffee with a master teacher, or maybe wading in and out of a calm ocean… Continue reading
Sometimes it’s the simplest tweaks that make a project pop – and this one turned out to be even simpler and more effective than I had envisioned. Eighth graders at my school do an individual or partnered community impact project each year… Continue reading
Asking students to use books for research sometimes feels old-fashioned even to me, an inveterate reader. So much exists online, in subscription databases and on the free web, and students instinctively reach for their phones or a keyboard to discover information. Yet doing research for my own master’s degree in history over the past few years… Continue reading
Sarah Cooper agreed to answer a few questions about her book, Creating Citizens: Teaching Civics and Current Events In The History Classroom. “You write about teaching history as a chronology versus teaching it thematically. Can you elaborate on both, and why you choose a thematic focus?”… Continue reading…
The person I always return to is my mother, Jane Schaffer. She taught high school English and was a teacher of teachers. I’ve written before about the help she gave me during my first years in the classroom. My mom reminded me… Continue reading
A recent one-day professional growth workshop epitomized what I hope students will take away from my classes: a sense that their well-informed communication can change the world. The event, Poetic Convergence, was on a Saturday, and it took more than an hour… Continue reading
When my school has gathered data from our students through the High School Survey of Student Engagement and Middle Grades Survey of Student Engagement, a few favorite kinds of activities appear over and over again… Continue reading
Sarah Cooper 