ERIN SPONAUGLE

First of all, everybody is tired. Your students, their parents, your coworkers, you. The third quarter of the school year tends to be when the heaviest content is taught, and the most work is piled on, which means kids who are already struggling to keep up are hitting a wall right about now. When someone is overloaded and their executive function is running on fumes, things come out of their mouths that probably shouldn't. We're not that different, honestly. We just have

When our students don't do their work, we can't see what they know. We can't give them feedback. We can't tell if they're ready for the next level of content, and we can't make the professional judgment we're being paid to make about their progress. That's frustrating on a purely practical level. few things in the classroom will get to you faster than planning a solid lesson, designing an assignment that actually gives you something to work with, and then watching the work n

Teachers can't be the only ones our students learn from. Standing up there every day, pouring everything we know into a room full of kids while they absorb it passively from their seats, or worse, from their iPads, is a fast track to being completely emptied out by October. Cooperative learning shifts that dynamic. When students work together, they teach each other, and sometimes they are honestly better at teaching certain things to one another than we are.

If you are a teacher in the United States right now, you already know what I'm about to say. The things our students are seeing in the news or right outside the front doors of their own homes are heavy. Every time you check the news, it feels like we are teaching in a time of tragedy or crisis. They involve real people's safety, real families, and real fear. And those same students are walking through your classroom door every morning carrying all of it, whether or not you ca

The demands. The constant changes. The workload. The very real concerns for our own safety and the safety of our students. The fact that we carry our personal lives right alongside all of that, because we don't stop being people just because we walked into a school building. When I first decided to become a teacher, people questioned whether it was a wise choice given my history with anxiety and panic attacks. And I get it: on the surface, putting a high-strung person in a h

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