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Differentiate instruction with AI
Big Apple Award winner and Bronx special education teacher Benjamin Jones encourages his fellow educators to use artificial intelligence software to quickly and simply alter or adjust curriculum to meet the needs of all learners, including students...
Map out key concepts
Social studies teacher and Big Apple Award fellow Jay Maqsood discusses the merits of concept mapping to help students better retain and synthesize complex information and sets of data points.
Ways to build SEL skills in the classroom
As a school counselor, I recommend that classroom teachers do these four things to support students in their social-emotional growth.
Setting the stage to engage with text
High school teacher Amy Matthusen of East-West School of International Studies in Queens explains how to deepen students' engagement with a play or novel by having them produce a talk show featuring characters from the text.
Helping students become analytical readers
Strategies such as journaling, reader’s notes and social-emotional prompts can help students make the leap to making inferences from the fiction and non-fiction they read.
Student-created reviews boost math skills
As a middle school math teacher, I’ve learned that providing students with spiral reviews — having students revisit concepts throughout the year — created by their peers instills a sense of ownership of the work. It typically makes the problems more...
Let students take the wheel sometimes
In my work as a 10th-grade social studies teacher, I’ve found that fostering student agency — allowing students some choices and control over how their day goes — increases engagement.
Here are some ways that a classroom teacher can encourage...
Collaborative roles key with small groups
The Department of Education has recently encouraged special education and integrated co-teaching teachers to prioritize targeted small-group instruction, including station teaching. That shift has meant that I’ve had to learn new classroom management...
Three informal assessment options
Sometimes, informal assessments can be more meaningful and less anxiety-provoking than traditional tests for students. Three informal assessments I use in my high school chemistry classes are 10-Point Bingo, a whiteboard activity and “I Can”...
Make connections with hexagonal thinking
How do you teach elaboration, “adding on” and targeted vocabulary without making student discussion feel forced? Enter hexagonal thinking.