In the previous two Sensory Series posts, we covered meeting the sensory needs of students and designing a sensory sensitive classroom. The final piece of the sensory puzzle is how devices can assist students in the classroom. Can technology help students with sensory issues? And can it impede their learning if we aren’t attentive to their needs?

Response to Intervention (RTI) helps to support all students within a school. It is a systematic approach to meeting the needs of all children. Instead of individual teachers in individual classrooms working to help students, the entire school system works as a whole to help all of the students. Here is an overview of how to think about Response to Intervention.

Teachers who have taught for a few years know that every individual class takes on its own personality. Hopefully it is not a clash of personality, but a class of personality. Each of the individuals in the room add to create one overall classroom “personality.” Even one or two new students moving into or leaving a classroom can change the entire culture and dynamic of the room.

Teachers deal with many challenges throughout the year. The top five, which you can read about in a previous post, are having too many masters, budget constraints, time, student needs, and teacher burn-out. And on any given day, these challenges can come at us all at once! I wish I could wave my magical pointer and make these challenges disappear. We teachers may be superheroes, but we unfortunately do not have superpowers—another challenge to add to the list. What I can do is offer some suggestions to help make these challenges a little less challenging:

In Part 1 of the Sensory Series, we discussed meeting the various sensory needs of students. The classroom environment plays a major role—and when it comes to setting up a classroom, there are already so many things to consider. Teachers have to find a spot for everyone to sit, think about the flow of the room, the space for technology, the location of the MimioBoard touch board, and where to put the Kleenex. Whew! And this doesn’t even really scratch the surface.

No one has to tell you that money in public education is tight, so it never hurts to find grants or awards to help improve your school’s standing. Whether you want to enhance global learning, have students better master STEM courses, or purchase technology that general budgets can’t afford, opportunities worth thousands of dollars are available for the taking this school year.

Here we go—off to another year! We’ve got the bulletin boards up, pencils sharpened, desks arranged, nametags labeled, and we feel well-rested after the summer break. We come into each year with a renewed sense of energy, ready to tackle all of the challenges that come our way. Here are the top five challenges we commonly face in the classroom as teachers:

Over the past few decades, more and more information has been unpacked around the area of sensory issues with students. Some of this has come from research about the autism spectrum, while some has come from other areas of the medical field, including allergies, processing disorders, and the like.

In a classroom, it can be difficult to not only understand all of these needs, but to also help students who have them. Teachers are not medical experts by any means, but with a little background knowledge, it can be easier to understand our students and how to help them. In our three-part Sensory Series, we’ll be exploring the different ways to approach varying sensory needs.

It’s a new month, and you know what that means: Time for more Mimio tips and tools! Kick off the fall season with these valuable tips to help you create engaging lessons all month long.

We are constantly striving to enhance the learning process, but one of the biggest challenges we may face when trying to effectively teach our students is their behavior. Students come to us without the ability to cope and manage in the classroom—they can often struggle to focus and attend to the learning. Some of these behaviors and more common and more extreme than they were in the past.

Because of this, it is important for teachers to be ready for these students stepping into their classrooms. Having a plan is always important, so here is a guide for how to put together a data-driven behavior improvement plan for an individual student.