Professional learning communities (PLCs) are at the forefront in education today. This initiative was brought forth after much research was done on the highest-performing schools in the lowest socioeconomic areas. The big takeaway is when school leaders and teachers implement best practice teaching for each child, overall school achievement improves. By all appearances, PLCs look like a group of grade-level teachers (or department teachers) who plan, organize, and implement a curriculum. However, effective PLCs are quite different.         

The perfect witch’s brew is full of different elements: an eye of newt, a feather from an eagle, a drop of raven tears—there is a mix of just about everything! A great lesson plan is kind of the same way. There is a dash of engagement, at teaspoon of technology, and a heaping cup of cognitive thinking to make the perfect education “stew.” 

In order to harness that excitement of the Halloween season and increase engagement with our students, teachers should consider developing themed lessons around fun Halloween ideas. Teachers should also consider how they can integrate technology to make the lesson even more fun. Finally, using a theme and technology is great, but high-level thinking makes lessons the best they can be. 

Knowing that 60 percent of the jobs that elementary school students will fill haven’t even been invented yet, Huntington Beach City School District (HBCSD) is on a mission to prepare those students for successful futures by transforming its classrooms into 21^st century learning environments. 

“If you were in a classroom 10 years ago and told your high school English teacher that you were going to write a blog, your teacher would have looked at you like you'd lost your mind,” says Gregory Haulk, HBCSD’s superintendent. “They would have told you that there was no way you could make a living at it, and to start thinking about writing for a newspaper.”

Congratulations—you made it through the madness of the first month back! Now that you and your students are settled, why not work a little fall and Halloween fun into your lessons?

Here is our collection of themed content for October: 

Today’s students are digital natives, so it makes sense to incorporate displays into the learning process. But what’s the best way to use this technology? You want to make sure your students are learning as much as possible, but you also want to keep things fun so they won’t get bored!

Some of you have been in the classroom for almost six weeks, while others have just begun. Making changes to your classroom at this point in the school year may sound odd, but sometimes it is good to make a change after a few weeks to spice things up. 

If you’re thinking about shaking up your classroom dynamic, here are some easy changes you can incorporate:

The term “eduhero” has become popular over the past few years, but what exactly does it mean? I would define it as someone who is a “voice” in education. It could be a teacher who tweets pictures of their classroom, a prominent education author, a Pinterest teacher star, or a Teachers-Pay-Teachers whiz. The common thread between all eduheros is that they use social media to promote what they do in the classroom. The Twitter hashtag #eduhero is another way to tag teachers who are doing great things.

Saying that parenting is hard is a complete understatement. It is tiring, draining, challenging—and did I mention tiring? It’s also the most rewarding thing that I have ever done, and is worth all the late nights, smelly messes, and stressful car rides. 

I am very blessed when it comes to parenting. My wife and I work well together when it comes to our kids. As we were growing up, we both had great examples of what good parenting looks like. We have enough resources to take care of the needs of our kids, and sometimes we can even provide them with an extra experience in life that we didn’t have when we were kids ourselves.

But even with all of those advantages, parenting is still really stressful and hard for us at times. Removing any of those other supports—two parents in the home, good upbringing ourselves, or a lack of resources—would result in making it even harder.

We all know that uneasy feeling of sitting in front of a blank white screen trying to decide where to begin when it comes to designing and creating an interactive lesson. You can feel it just thinking about it, right? We also know how tough it can be to look at lesson after lesson on the web or an IWB website trying to decide if a lesson is good and whether or not it will be engaging for your students.

Interactive whiteboards give us an opportunity to excite our students about learning through multi-sensory, hands-on interaction with content, so we want to be sure that the lessons that we create and use for instruction are high-quality and engaging. Here are some design components that will help you create and/or choose lessons that achieve positive learning outcomes with your students.

Every classroom has its handful of personalities that make it memorable and distinct—this makes teaching both fun and frustrating at the same time. All of these students add flavor to the classroom, but at times, they may need help or encouragement to mature in one area or another.

As we emphasize a growth mindset in the classroom, we can help to support them in this. A student who lacks leadership skills may need to be encouraged to voice their opinion, or a student who is overly competitive may need help to learn how to be a good sport when losing.

Here is an approach to our students that we work with every day that helps us to relate to a few of these “stereotypical” types of kids. Keep in mind that this isn’t intended to make fun of any student, but to acknowledge that we all have areas of growth. We don’t want to just “be annoyed” by excessive sneezing, grouchiness, or shyness—these can be warning signs of other issues that we should keep an eye on. Most of the time though, these small quirks from our students become endearing over time.