The Todd Cast - Teaching Theory into Teaching Practice

Students as Teachers - What can make an assessment meaningful? By having students involved in the process. The more you include them in the learning process, such as having them act as the teachers of what is to be learned, the better change students will reach an enduring understanding. There are other advantages as well which can be found in this ToddCast.

Capstones - Capstones are an excellent way to assess students meaningfully by reflecting on what they have learned. They can be set up various ways but are typically long-term projects that encapsulate what was learned which is usually presented to an authentic audience. It is a great way to teach 21st century skills and for assessing what students truly learned.

Advisory Groups - Sometimes the best way to discuss the social and emotional needs of students is to actually sit down and talk about their social and emotional needs. This requires carving out some time in the school day/week to do this. This can be something as simple as Morning Meeting where you take 15 minutes once a week to ponder open ended questions. It could be more formal such as advisory...

Teaching Public Speaking - A valuable 21st century skill for any student to possess. How do you teach public speaking though? 1) You provide exemplar speeches to learn from as well as poor ones. 2) You provide students with the space to practice and refine their public speaking ability. 3) You give them chances to present to authentic audiences.

Teaching Leadership - With many 21st century skills, we provide students with engaging lessons and hope for the best. We need to be more purposeful about the teaching of 21st century skills. Take leadership for example. How do we put students in situations where they are able to develop leadership skills? We try to find authentic situations where they have to show initiative to collaborate, adapt,...

Self/Peer Evaluations - How can you get a better idea of a student's contributions to his group when collaborating? Ask those who are working with him to tell you. The use of self and peer evaluations gives you many other sets of eyes looking at whether the students are living up to the norms they set and producing high quality work as a result of the group effort. It also helps to balance the gra...

Roles in Group Work - When students are tasked to work in groups and accomplish a task, we often worry more about equity rather than fairness. Equity would be that everyone in the group does the same type of work and the same amount of work. Wouldn't it make more sense to take student strengths and have them contribute that to the group to ensure the product that is created has the best people on...

Forming Group Norms - It is essential that everyone is one the same page and has the same expectations while working together in a group. One way to ensure this is to have the class or group form norms. Norms are the expected behavior of people in the groups. These are formed not by the leader/teacher, but rather by the participants by answering the essential question of what is needed to work eff...

Student Collaboration - When working in groups, students can create wonderful things, things they would not have been able to produce on their own. But working in groups can also be a pain. How do you get students to successfully collaborate while working in groups? The key is finding their strengths and what they bring to the group. This also creates an awareness of others and what they bring as...

Creating Rubrics - Rubrics are a valuable way for teachers to assess students in non-traditional, performance-based assessments, many of which require students to employ 21st century skills. The argument some people make against them though is that rubrics are often subjective because they are based on the teacher’s opinion rather than an objective multiple-choice question where there is a single...

Using Calendars to Maintain Focus - It can be difficult for students to maintain focus, especially on long-term projects. One of the tools you can use to help keep students on-task is the use of a calendar. This ToddCast will show you how you can use backwards building to create a calendar as well as how these can be used to teach students valuable time-management skills.

Student contracts - Student contracts can be useful for a few reasons. It keeps students organized, it makes them part of the learning process, and it helps them to maintain focus, especially on long-term projects. Contracts can break down a big picture project to make it more palatable to handle and easier to manage time. Used in conjunction with a calendar, rubric, and syllabus, it can keep stud...

Creating an Effective Syllabus - Often on long term projects it can be a challenge to keep students focused on what it is they are supposed to be learning. One tool to help with this is the use of a well written syllabus. This can be used with students when going over the project as well as being used throughout as a reference for students. It also communicates to parents what their child is going...

Case-Based Learning - Concluding the theme of inquiry learning, this ToddCast looks at case-based learning, a method used widely in the medical and law professions but not used very commonly in US primary schools. Learn about the benefits of case-based learning which are having a relevant subject matter to engage students and being able to apply what you learn to a real world situation.

Problem-Based Learning - One of the strategies under the inquiry-based learning umbrella, problem-based learning seeks to make the learning authentic for students and to help them see the context of what it is they are learning. The students are the ones driving the learning and the teacher acts as a facilitator, helping them find resources and asking questions meant to get them thinking.

Project-Based Learning - Projects put students in a real-world setting and ask them to complete a task meeting the requirements as laid out by the project. Projects teach students how to learn for themselves. It also has other advantages such as collaboration, public speaking, and organization, all 21st century skills that would benefit any student. By using projects in your classroom you will be...

Learning Styles - In this edition of ToddCast, I talk about Kolb's 7 different learning styles and how knowing which ones are your students' strengths is very important to teaching them effectively. For every learning style there are suggestions for how to practice this in the classroom.

Organized Chaos - Which classroom do you think has the most learning going on; the one where students are compliantly sitting in rows, being talked to by the teacher, or the one where they are involved in the learning process but are loud and it seems like chaos? The second one in my experience results in the most creative and meaningful learning. But how do you organize this chaos? This ToddCast...

Classroom setup - Are you being purposeful about the way you physically set up your classroom? Is this setup conducive to your students being able to best learn? This ToddCast will look at ways to set up your classroom and the reasonings for doing so.

Probing or Follow-Up Questions - Asking a good question is essential, but even more important is the question you follow it up with. This is a good way to raise the rigor in your classroom and get students thinking beyond just the most obvious answer or the surface level one. By asking these follow-up questions it allows you to become the meddler in the middle, having conversations with students a...

How to ask higher level questions - if you want to raise the rigor in your classroom and ensure that you are teaching to the level of the standard, you need to be able to ask higher level questions of your students. You can use a structure such as Bloom's Taxonomy to help in the construction of these questions because there is usually a specific verb associated with each of the different levels. T...

Teaching to the Level of the Standard - As teachers we are charged with teaching students the content standards as determined by Common Core, Next Generation Science, or state created standards. Often times we teach to the noun of the standard, making sure students are getting the content, but how often are we paying attention to the verb which determines the level of thinking the standard is aski...

Raising the Rigor - We often talk about raising the rigor in the classroom but do you really know what that looks like? This ToddCast will help you to distinguish between a hard question and a rigorous one as well as providing a framework for how to raise the rigor for your students.

Performance Assessment - When it comes to measuring what students have learned, there are more choices than the traditional assessments of multiple choice. There are performance assessments which include but are not limited to oral presentations, journals, exhibitions, role playing, debates/speeches, essays, interviews, and research papers. These performance assessments allow you to measure diffic...

Reflection in the Classroom - The traditional method of teaching is introduce something, have students practice it until they get it, and assess whether they have gotten it or not, then move onto the next something that has to be taught. What is missing here is the additional layer or step of reflecting upon what was learned. It is here where students explore what they truly learned and provides t...