If you’ve followed our series on the importance of brain breaks in the classroom (especially brain break games), you know how passionate we are about the need for them. Not the fact that they’re nice, but that they’re a need. I’ll never forget the afternoon my students were slogging through a heavy document analysis, and … Read more
I once heard teaching described as “herding cats,” and I laughed because I’ve lived it. Not in my own high school history classroom (11th graders are a different kind of chaos), but in the elementary classrooms I’ve spent time in as a trainer and as a parent volunteer. I remember standing in a kindergarten classroom … Read more
The room was too quiet, and I knew that wasn’t a good thing. It was right after lunch, and I was standing in front of my high school juniors, watching their eyes glaze over as I walked through what I thought was a perfectly fine lesson on primary source analysis. Then one student raised his … Read more
The first time I realized the strategies for classroom management plan I was using weren’t working, I was standing near the pencil sharpener, watching a sophomore slam his chair into the floor for the third time that period. I’d told him “no” about something minor. Can’t even remember what it was now. What I do … Read more
The best collaboration project I ever ran started with a message on ePals. I created a profile seeking an international partner class to compare World War II family narratives, and a teacher in Germany reached out. He taught a similar age group and was covering the same period. We decided to have our students write … Read more
I was sitting at my desk during my planning period, grading a stack of essays from my high school history classes, when the guidance counselor appeared at my door. “Jenn, I just got a call from a parent. She wants to schedule a parent teacher conference. Her son’s grade has dropped significantly this quarter, and … Read more
I was standing at the front of my fourth-period U.S. History class during the second semester of 2015, feeling pretty good about myself. I had spent the weekend crafting this incredible lesson on the New Deal, complete with primary sources and a mock congressional hearing. My sophomores were going to be so into it. About … Read more
I remember sitting in my classroom at 4:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, staring at a stack of essays I hadn’t touched in three days. The hallway had gone quiet an hour earlier. My coffee was cold. I had a splitting headache that had started somewhere around second period and never let up. A parent email … Read more
I remember the exact moment I realized something had shifted. I was teaching my World History class, and we were discussing primary-source accounts of the Rwandan genocide. A student raised her hand and asked, completely matter-of-fact, “Why didn’t they just move to a different country?” No malice. No coldness. Just a genuine question that revealed … Read more
I remember sitting at my desk during planning period, staring at a stack of unit tests on the causes of World War I. For weeks, I’d watched my sophomores confuse long-term causes like militarism and the alliance system with short-term triggers like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I’d seen it in their document analyses, … Read more
In month 3 of my first job, teaching World History for three months by then, I still had a student who hadn’t muttered a word. Not once. She turned in maybe a third of the assignments. I remember standing there, thinking, “I have no idea what to do with this kid.” That moment stuck with me … Read more
I vividly remember standing in the back of my classroom watching a student meticulously fold a paper football. He wasn’t disruptive. He wasn’t sleeping. He had simply checked out so completely that origami felt like a better use of his time than the debate we were having about the Treaty of Versailles. That moment stuck … Read more