Teaching Today

Let’s be real: teacher appreciation week should be EVERY week. In this special episode, we want to honor and to celebrate the challenging work that teachers do every day to educate and to inspire their students. We’ve brought our CPET colleagues together to share stories about the teachers who have had a profound impact on us as individuals.

What is the best way to teach children to read? This question has plagued teachers, administrators, and literacy specialists for decades in the K-12 space. This question is often a highly controversial one, as literacy issues can become caught up in politics — both within the field of education and depending which expert or company or program one is aligned with. This week, we're talking to Dr. Cr...

As teachers juggling many expectations, we may struggle to know whether our students are understanding what they are reading — unlike writing, reading comprehension is an entirely internal process. We may also struggle to keep up with the research surrounding best practices for improving our students’ reading comprehension. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Judy Willis, author of Teaching the B...

Because the classroom space encompasses so many routines and expectations, it can be daunting to begin conversations around implementing and sustaining positive change. Making a change — whether it's required or voluntary — can be difficult for both teachers and students. We can often become creatures of habit, comfortable with the status quo, even when we're aware that our habits could be improve...

Designing projects for an individual class can be a daunting experience, but what about for a whole district, and in the wake of the pandemic? At the height of exhaustion, many school and leaders within the Scarsdale Public Schools district were looking for ways to reignite a passion for learning in students and teachers. But how could teachers collaborate across disciplines, across grade levels,...

Writing projects can feel like a distraction, unless we look at the ways in which projects increase learning for students, and the ways in which we can integrate them into our calendars without losing teaching time for skills or content that we need to cover. This week, we're joined by participants from all levels of our signature writing projects — Meg Davis, one of our K-12 coaches; Vicky Beswic...

Connecting real-world scenarios to classroom content creates wonderful learning opportunities for students — but it also requires that teachers make many decisions about how to organize, sequence, and assess their instruction. Dr. Adele Bruni Ashley and Dr. Cristina Compton — both of whom lead CPET's project-based learning initiatives — talk with us this week about what sets project-based learning...

How can you locate effective teaching tools without spending hours combing through the internet? With website after website of education resources, it can be hard to tell which have been vetted and will be most useful for your practice. This week, we're chatting with two members of our coaching team — Dr. Cristina Compton and Lauren Midgette — about the resources they're currently using, and how t...

Coaching for equity is personal, and more complex than simply providing new information about a teaching strategy or protocol. At CPET, we ground this important work in four entry points that allow for educators to create a cultural shift within a community toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. Dr. Sherrish Holloman joins us this week to discuss the focus and potential challenges of each entry...

Given its complexity, conversations about grading for equity often dwell in highly theoretical spaces. Although these spaces can be conducive to nuanced discussion surrounding equity, they can also become distanced from practices used in real classrooms. To achieve more equitable grading practices, theory and practice must come together — how can we implement culturally relevant, responsive, and s...

Cultural and language diversity have an impact on how students are able to demonstrate what they know and understand — but how do implicit or institutional biases impact how we interpret and evaluate student learning? Dr. Sherrish Holloman returns this week to talk with us about the importance and complexity of culturally responsive grading.

Teachers have a lot of power to determine what and how they’re developing grading systems that reflect students’ knowledge, skills, and progress — but the process is complicated, and can sometimes cause harm. In this episode, we’re talking with Ashlynn Wittchow about systems of grading, and assessing the benefits and drawbacks of different models.

Whether you entered the spring semester with the same students and staff, or are starting fresh, developing and maintaining a positive community is critical to maximizing the potential of students and adults. If you haven't been focusing on communities of practice, you may feel it's too late — or you may have communities of practice in place and are wondering what you can do to move to the next le...

Whether it’s the result of a single traumatic event, or one that's prolonged, the impact of stressful situations can spread to students' cognition, emotional regulation, and ability to connect with others. In this episode we’re talking with Adam Wolfsdorf and Kristen Wedlock, authors of the book Navigating Trauma in the English Classroom. What is trauma, and how does it show up in school? How can...

Whether we’re starting from scratch or resetting expectations, the new year always presents an opportunity to embrace the humanity of our students and the important goals we’re aspiring to. This week, Roberta and Cristina share their experiences of returning to school after a holiday break, and the strategies they’ve found effective for connecting with themselves and their students at the start of...

We look back at some of the best shortcuts, insights, motivations, and aha moments that we published to help educators meet their professional goals this year. Mentioned in this episode: Centering Students for Literacy Engagement https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/centering-students-for-literacy-engagement-student-voice-choice-and-identity What Makes a Rigorous Question? https://cpet.tc.colum...

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to assessment for learning is the degree to which we’re able to gather information that accurately reflects what our students know and can do in the moment. It takes practice and careful planning to design meaningful assessments, and use the information in the moment to adjust instruction. This week, we’re talking with two members of our coaching team, D...

Interesting books are coming out every day, but we don’t always have the time to read everything that’s worth knowing about, and it's hard to know which books to invest in. As founder of The Main Idea, Jenn Lang tackles this challenge by distilling the most important information about a book — in only eight pages. Jenn returns this week to break down Priya Parker's book, "The Art of the Gathering:...

Class discussions are dynamic spaces for students to be meaning makers and critical thinkers, and offer unique opportunities for processing ideas, building new concepts with peers, and internalizing key learning points. But the ephemeral nature of discussions is a challenge, because although discussions ends, the learning components within them should be transferable in future reading and writing...

Highly effective discussions require a host of invisible skills that students may or may not pick up organically over time. Without careful instruction or scaffolding, class discussions are often more like Q&A sessions than they are a thoughtful exchange of ideas. We’re talking with Dr. Sherrish Holloman and Kelsey Hammond this week, two of the facilitators who’ve led our Keep the Kids Talking onl...

Conflicts that emerge with young people can be emotionally, physically, and academically harmful. When adults are in situations where they are responsible for resolving conflicts, it’s easy to slip into classic power dynamics that reinforce bias and oppression, making it even harder to seek true resolution. In this episode, we’re talking with Rahul Patel, a Restorative Justice Coordinator with the...

Despite what the media may depict, teaching is not all about summer vacations and chatting it up in the lounge between classes. It’s challenging day in and day out, so much so that after the pandemic, we’re seeing educators leave the field in record numbers. Today we’re talking with Alison Cohen, a former high school teacher and professional development coach who now specializes in mindfulness inc...

There is a deep divide between selecting a high-leverage curriculum and implementing it. This divide is professional learning. We can’t just assume that anyone can pick up a packaged curriculum and implement it with fidelity on their own. It takes time, energy and support to analyze, adapt and adjust for your students. Today we’re talking with Molly Gurny and Grace McCarty from the Center for Publ...

Cooperating teachers volunteer to host a student teacher, but many discover that teaching through modeling, giving feedback, and collaboration with their apprentice, usually over the course of a semester, is not as easy as it looks. In this episode, we’re talking with Dr. Marcelle Mentor and Dr. Kelly DeLuca — the Teachers College, Columbia University faculty members responsible for identifying co...

Teachers go through years of education and hundreds of hours of internships to become certified or licensed to teach in their area of study, but there’s often very little training that goes into becoming a teacher leader. Teacher leaders often jump — or are thrown — into their roles without realizing how much support they need to develop the nuanced skills needed to lead adults on teams or in coac...