Published Articles

Empowering Students with Data – EdWeek Teacher
Eight Qualities of a Great Teacher Mentor – EdWeek Teacher
Teaching Secrets: 5 Ways to Make Co-Teaching Work – EdWeek Teacher
Managing Teacher Absences Through Collaboration – EdWeek Teacher
4 Ways to Get Students Interested in Extracurricular Clubs – EdWeek Teacher

Workshop Presentations

Giving Effective Feedback – Illinois State University New Teacher Conference
Working With Your Team – Illinois Education Association Student Program Conference
Daily 5 & Daily Cafe – Illinois Education Association Student Program Conference

Classroom Freebies

Novel in a Day Graphic Organizer

Have you ever read a novel in a day with your class? This exciting activity is great when you have a guest author visiting, have snow days and need to get through large amounts of literature, or are just looking for a way to push your students ability to analyze literature. My students struggled to understand what was happening in their assigned chapters and the use of a graphic organizer was necessary. It allowed them to track both basic main ideas and then to dig deeper into the text and have a rich discussion as a class when each group shared what happened in their chapters.

How it works:
Divide the novel into the number of student groups you will need based on the length of the novel. Then give each group only their assigned pages. You will have to purchase two copies of the novel for this and then… rip the pages out based on how you have broken it up. The students love this! If you teach multiple sections I would suggest you collect the portioned pages at the end of each class to reuse.

Team Building Activity – Saving Sam

This activity was first designed to introduce students to the scientific method, but I used it as a team building activity with my middle school reading class. It is not messy (plus from the my perspective), but highly interactive! Make sure you tell students, Sam is not a bird, he cannot fly while you are trying to get the life preserver, or put it on him. As each group completed the challenge, I broke their group up and made those students “coaches”. They then went to the other teams and coached the other students. I was very clear that they cannot just give away the answer. This generated even more excitement because by the time there was one group left, the entire class was cheering, supporting, and offering their advice. Here is a Google presentation I used during the activity.