These ideas can be used in any class, or any subject, but arose as a solution to a specialist situation. Specialist teachers have such limited time with students—and so many students—that getting an overview of students’ learning becomes a perpetual
Children Need to Play
I’m sure that I’m mostly preaching to the choir here, but more and more research is coming out with a clear message about childhood: Children learn through play. This is how human beings are programmed to learn. And yet, more
Making Mistakes
I recently dedicated some time to closing some of the 86 tabs I had open, and I finally had a chance to read an Edutopia article that I’d opened long ago. As inquiry teachers, and certainly as music teachers as
Tweet Your Learning
A great “exit ticket” for older students: At the end of class, give your students a few minutes to tweet a summary of the lesson (in 140 characters or less) using a designated hashtag, like #<CLASSNAMEdate> or #<schoolabbreviation>music<date>. Encourage them
Revisiting Culture
Well, apparently my iceberg post was recently discovered and has been shared around quite a bit, not only in education circles, but also political science, health, and social justice communities. I love that I’ve gotten some great feedback about it
Instead of “I don’t know”
Okay, the title is a ruse. Children say, “I don’t know.” You can’t stop them. It’s a go-to response, it’s natural, and it’s fine. But what we want is for students to not stop there. “So you don’t know (or
10 Fun Formative Assessments
Here are some creative formative assessments for this beautiful Friday! Get children using their critical thinking skills to synthesize their knowledge and apply what they have learned. These ideas can be used in any subject. Students design an ad (for a
Context, Not Drills
There is a lot of debate about homework these days. When I was in school, homework was pages of multiplication problems, or reading a text and answering simple recall questions (usually worded identically in the question and the text, so
Encouraging Critical Thinking in Music Class, Part I
Critical thinking. This skill, highly valued by educators and continuously devalued by policymakers, is core to PYP or any other high quality education. The IB Mission Statement refers to an understanding that different people can be “right” in different ways.
Developing New Units: Kindergarten
As I wrote in this post… A while back, our school put the entire How We Express Ourselves theme into the hands of the Arts teachers. In a lot of ways, this was a fantastic idea. (And in just as