Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Nov 14Member-onlyWhat If It’s Trauma and Not “Learning Loss”?What if students abruptly had to stop attending school? What if children could no longer play with their friends? What if families were forced to remain inside their homes and not go out into the world? …Teaching3 min readTeaching3 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Nov 2Member-onlyWhy Team MattersTeaching can be a lonely profession. I know that seems like an odd statement. Some days, I go home with a sore throat because I’ve talked so much. I eat lunch in a cafeteria surrounded by 200 people, and I answer hundreds of questions each day. When you have hundreds…Education4 min readEducation4 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Oct 25Member-onlyWhen Was Your Last Field Trip?I had not been on a field trip in three whole years. Until today. Our grade level hike in the fall of 2019 was the last time I had been off campus with students. We had a trip to see a play planned in early March of 2020, It was…Education3 min readEducation3 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Oct 19Member-onlyWhat About “Recess Loss”?I’ve seen a lot on social media about recess. Some teachers are commenting that their middle schoolers need recess. Others are dreading indoor recess activities as the weather gets colder and messier. Still others are finding their recess duties are depleting their most valuable resource: time. I found it interesting…Education3 min readEducation3 min read
Published in ILLUMINATION·Oct 15Member-onlyWhat Did This Teacher Think of Justin Welsh’s Course?Do you purchase courses online? I’ve purchased many and been disappointed. What I’ve found is that the creators struggle with how to organize the information and create goals for each lesson. I get lost in their “lectures,” and creators often use jargon without defining it for their audience. As a…Online Marketing3 min readOnline Marketing3 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Oct 10Member-onlyLike It or Not, Social Media Is Here to Stay“Ms. Smith, then why do people think the earth is flat?” I looked at him and said, “I don’t know because it isn’t. Right?” I was teaching geography, and we were playing around with Google Earth on my classroom monitor. A quite perplexed fifth grader posed the question. When I…Education3 min readEducation3 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Oct 7Member-onlyDo We Need An Emoji Fluency Course?“Jenn, do the kids capitalize in your class? How about the continents, oceans, countries?” My colleague and I chatted about what we’re noticing with students this year. I told her yes, students are making an effort to capitalize proper nouns in my class. …Education4 min readEducation4 min read
Published in ILLUMINATION·Oct 5Member-onlyLinkedIn Hits Differently For WomenI created my LinkedIn profile years ago when the platform emerged. I never really engaged, however, until January of this year. I realized LinkedIn had transformed and committed to daily posts and engagement. What I learned very quickly was that LinkedIn can be very creepy. My first surprise was when…Culture3 min readCulture3 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Sep 19Member-onlyMy Favorite Sites for Applying Geography SkillsI started teaching before the internet was easily accessible. In those early years, I developed ideas and lessons that centered around books, articles, and primary sources. Students often had great questions, but we could not answer them as readily and quickly as we can today. Post-pandemic, I have so many…Education4 min readEducation4 min read
Published in Teachers on Fire Magazine 🔥·Sep 16Member-onlyWhat About Choice in Our Classrooms?When do you learn best? Is it when you are required to learn the material or skill, or when you choose what to learn? Would you process the information better if you created a physical representation or wrote a paper? …Education4 min readEducation4 min read
