Buckle up for this one.

The “Are jeans considered professional dress?” conversation is nothing new. While some schools allow teachers to wear jeans on Fridays, others allow them at all times. Some schools offer jeans passes to teachers as incentives, and many schools allow teachers to wear jeans if they pay a fee. It’s infantilizing and insulting if you ask me, but this article isn’t about what I think. It’s about the white-hot rage teacher Twitter is feeling right now in response to a tweet from yesterday.

Last night, Twitter user and English/Language Arts teacher @ObsessedTeach posted this update:

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Naturally, her post had teachers scanning the photo for what could possibly be deemed offensive in her outfit.

That’s right: @ObsessedTeach was doing a unit on the ’70s and wore bell bottoms along with her students. She was sent home for looking “unprofessional.”

Other responders took a more humorous

What Is A Literature Circle?

by Terry Heick

Literature Circles are a way for students to assume a specific role in the study of something (usually a text).

Though almost always associated with the content area of ‘Literature’ or ‘Language Arts’ in North America, the concept of studying a topic in groups by assigning functional roles for each group member can be applied in the study of almost anything (something I will cover in an upcoming post on how to teach with Literature Circles).

For now, let’s review the key components of this versatile teaching, learning, and literacy strategy.

See also Reading Response Questions That Work With Almost Any Text

The Characteristics Of Literature Circles

Poskanzer and Castilla promised to keep the identity of the elite college they studied a secret in order to publish their findings. But they described it as a Northeastern private college that is “representative” of the top 25 schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report.  Like other elite schools, the student body is wealthy. Half of the students hail from ZIP codes with mean household incomes over $100,000, a threshold that only 6 percent of ZIP codes in America met during the study period.

More than a third of the legacy students who applied were accepted, compared with only 14 percent of non-legacy students. That added up to almost 3,300 children of alumni accepted during the 16 years that the researchers studied. Legacy students are a major category, rivaling the total number of students of other races and ethnicities. Approximately, 3,500 Black students, 3,100 Hispanic students and 7,300 Asian

posted on October 19, 2022
News

Hey Teachers! Have you heard of LearnStorm? Wondering what LearnStorm is? LearnStorm is a classroom tool that combines growth–mindset activities and lesson-aligned practice to drive mastery of core academic skills, motivate classrooms, and build students’ confidence.

LearnStorm is the world’s only classroom engagement tool that both drives skill mastery AND gets kids dancing — and it’s FREE for you and your students! Read on to hear what students and teachers love about LearnStorm and how you can sign your class up today.

LearnStorm is a popular classroom tool among teachers

One thing is for certain — teachers love LearnStorm and highly recommend it as a great motivational tool for students. Beyond student motivation, teachers have discovered LearnStorm is an excellent resource for differentiation, community building, and college readiness. To hear more teacher experiences, watch LaToya’s story or Carmen’s story as they share how impressed

It’s Sunday night, and as you eat dinner your mind drifts to the stack of papers on your desk that need to be graded, the emails from parents waiting in your inbox, and your lesson plan for tomorrow morning that could use another glance. You have to be at school at 7 am, and you groan when you count the few hours between now and then. 

Sound familiar? Whether you call it the Sunday blues, Sunday anxiety, or the Sunday scaries, the fact is that Sunday night is filled with stress and worry for 80% of professionals, according to a LinkedIn survey. These Sunday scary feelings often come from one of two places:

• Dread about the work week ahead and upcoming tasks, or
• Regret over how the weekend was spent and things that did not get done

Both feelings ultimately come from a place of anxiety, and this anxiety

It may be a constantly changing world for our students, but one thing is for certain: Being kind is just as important now as ever before. Send students the message that kindness is a top priority—and honor the reality that showing it can take courage, creativity, and persistence—by including books about it in your curriculum. Here are 23 of our favorite kindness books for the classroom.

(Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!)

1. Boo Who? by Ben Clanton (Pre-K–1)

It can be hard to find ways to include someone new—especially when that someone is invisible—but it’s worth the effort. Simple and sweet, it’s easy for kids to “see” the possible connections between this story and their own lives.

Buy it: Boo Who? on Amazon

2. What Does It Mean To Be Kind?

PBL Spotlight: 5th Grade Restaurant Math Tipping Guide

by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD

Every year since their kindergarten years I have extended my offer to teachers of my daughters to help out in any way they might find useful. Some of them have taken me up on my offer and asked me to chaperone a field trip or help with some minor classroom activities on special occasions, and I was happy to help.

But I was ecstatic in 2017, when my oldest daughter’s 5th-grade teacher, Kristen Rowling (now Taylor) asked me to collaborate on some PBL planning and co-teaching. What we came up with together was a relatively short project that incorporated an authentic audience and a product that helped her contextualize a need to learn how to mathematically work with decimals and percentages in meaningful ways.

This project isn’t meant to serve as an exemplar–for that please