Craft Category: Teaching Practices

Are you interested in learning how to better support your students who are learning English (“ELs”) by offering opportunities to use their home language in your general education classroom? If so, this guide will map out specific ways to engage your students who are learning English and leverage their multilingualism as an asset to their learning, enabling personalized instruction that pushes content mastery in new and engaging ways.

Are you looking for ways to better support your students who are learning English (EL) within your personalized classroom? If so, this guide will map out specific strategies that can engage your learners in new ways through nonverbal communication, strategic language support, and linking language with learning through classroom activities and routines.

Educators need to translate data insights into instructional actions to harness the potential of student data. This guide will explore various data-informed instructional strategies and actions at the whole-group, small-group, and individual levels.

In order to support student agency and ownership of learning, educators need to develop practices that enable students to understand and use their own data in meaningful ways. This guide will explore various structures and strategies to accomplish this.

Personalization in classrooms requires broad, intentional use of data across schools and systems. This guide explores how leaders can foster effective data-driven instruction by setting aside time, creating structures, and offering supports needed to empower educators.

Clearly communicating the “why” behind a school’s innovative model – not just the model itself – is an essential strategy for building new teachers’ abilities to understand and implement. This guide will explore various ways schools and districts across the nation have identified, built, and shared their impetus for shifting to innovative models, the journey they have taken to get where they are, and their vision for the future.

When welcoming new teachers (whether new to the school or to teaching), it is important that you clearly communicate the nuts and bolts that make your innovative school possible. This includes specifics about your model and approach, the supports you offer (individually and as a school), expectations for educator and student competencies, and the basic programs used to support instruction. This guide will explore various ways schools and districts across the nation have shared these pieces and why they are so important to include in your onboarding process for new teachers.

When designing onboarding for new teachers (new to the school or to teaching in that school), it’s important to ensure they not only understand the school from an instructional standpoint but also get to know and understand the community they will serve. The community is a vital part of any school, and it encompasses much more than just the students in the classroom. Engaging with the full community involves getting to know families, meeting surrounding neighborhood partners, and even understanding the community’s demographic breakdown and how that impacts culturally relevant curriculum and approaches. This guide will explore various ways schools and districts across the nation have engaged their communities, illustrating how to share these components with new teachers and inspire them to see the community as a vital ally.

Educators seeking to understand and use Open Educational Resources (OER) can use this guide to help them search for high-quality, rigorous, and standards-aligned OER.

This guide will help educators and school leaders working with Open Educational Resources (OER) to personalize lessons and meet student needs.