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
Exit Slips as Formative Assessment
Well, I officially went back into school today to start getting ready for the upcoming school year. I’m just starting to get my head around my long-term view of what I’ll be teaching, but I have spent some time over
Assessment for/as/of Learning
Assessment is a big part of teaching. Without assessment, we don’t know what to teach (at least, we shouldn’t). We must constantly monitor and adjust our teaching to keep learning on track. Formative assessment and teaching are directly linked; neither
Singing Games
I’ve just had a refreshing return to my roots! Today was the last day of a three-day Kodály course with Dr. James Cuskelly. It’s been fifteen years since I was really focused on the Kodály Method, but it was just