Columbia Spotlight

Teaching for Justice does a great job every year providing educators resources to commemorate Martin Luther King Day. Scroll down below for those resources and several others that can help our students learn more about Dr. King.  The King Center is an incredible resource with webinars, educational materials, and lessons.  Teaching Tolerance's MLK Day resources  is an incredible repository of resources from their own site, but it is replete with links from other organizations too!  Facing History's MLK "Choosing to Participate" Lesson Stanford University's MLK Research & Education Institute's Education Resources   Edutopia's MLK Day resources PBS Newshour's lessons on MLK EDsitement's Virtual Martin Luther King Project

As we plan for our return-to-schedule, the number 1 question we receive is how can we expect our students to learn as much as they would if there wasn't a pandemic. My quick answer is that they can't and they will not. I am not trying to be flip, but just honest. Of course, I am not inviting huge learning gaps for our students, especially as we prepare them for college and careers. Instead, we must commend our supervisors and teachers who have been meeting all year looking to drill deep into the curricula and showcase the "power standards," if you will, and dispense with some of the content that can be -- in the year of a pandemic -- seem extraneous.  In a recent NYT piece  by Harvard's Dr. Jal Mehta, the professor asserts that educators need "to get very specific on what needs to be made up and what does not; teams of teachers and administrators could work together to decide what is essential to keep and what can be pared. We should take a page from the Japa...

As an AP European History teacher, I always reminded my students in the fall that we couldn't fool around because we HAD to kill Napoleon by Christmas. I reminded them that the looming AP test in May moved for no one, so we had to always stay on task.  Now, I never had to teach that class during a pandemic so we need to commend our faculty today who are balancing AP rigor with sensitivity to our students' needs during this coronavirus-affected year. Thankfully, CollegeBoard has just released some new teaching guides to go along with their AP Classroom materials to help teachers and students alike.  These course pacing guides provide one way to ensure students are exposed to all the course content and skills this year. The guide for your subject can help you assign the AP Daily videos and topic questions necessary for student-led learning each week, using the reports generated by these topic questions to focus your limited, direct class time on the areas where students need mo...

It is great to foster student voice and to watch them be successful in a competition, so when you can do both, sign them up! Click on this link so you can help students adopt the role of critic and "submit an original review about any kind of creative expression covered in The Times. Contest open from Dec. 8, 2020 to Jan. 26, 2021." Note:  Watch our free on-demand webinar  on teaching students how to write successful reviews. Do you like sharing your opinion with others? Do you have strong critiques and reactions to books, movies, restaurants or fashion? Are you a foodie or a gamer? If so, this contest is for you. We invite you to play critic and write an original review for our Sixth Annual Student Review Contest. What can you choose to review? Anything that fits into a category of creative expression that The New York Times covers — from architecture to music. One reason we created this contest is to give you space to stretch your cultural imagination. So, we ask that ...