Summer vacation is a great time for educators to get some much-needed rest and relaxation after a busy school year and intense testing season. However, getting too relaxed can make for a rough transition into the next school year. To take full advantage of your well-deserved free time, it’s important to fill your summer with productive, fun, and fulfilling activities that will leave you refreshed and ready to dive into another great year come fall.

Diversity continues to increase in public schools nationwide. One in four school children are listed as a first- or second-generation immigrant in the US, and 350 languages are spoken in homes across our nation. It is so important to teach tolerance, empathy, and acceptance to prepare students for a diverse world.

One excellent way to do this is to expose your students to a variety of cultures. This year, I spearheaded our first Culture Night. Our school population includes many different cultures, and we really wanted to build community and appreciation with our families.

There really isn't a secret formula for the best way to provide feedback to teachers—different kinds of teachers require different kinds of feedback. This can make the challenge of giving adequate but constructive feedback hard for those who provide it. Teaching can feel like a very personal and even private endeavor for teachers, so any critique or criticism about instruction can feel more personal than it probably should. 

Being a teacher is a more complex job than ever before. The challenges and stress of the position require teachers to possess an amazing ability to manage many dynamic factors all at once. One of the best examples for this is the emergency drills that we now partake in during the school day. Years ago, there was a fire drill every month, and possibly another drill depending on where you lived—we have tornado drills in our part of the country, but I know other locations have drills for earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Providing feedback to teachers can be a tricky prospect at times. Teaching, and instruction in particular, is a very personal undertaking. Getting up in front of a room of children takes a great deal of nerve at first, so as teachers become more and more accustomed to it, they tend to become more and more fixed in their approach to it.

This is a generalization, of course—not all teachers are like this. Some of the best teachers I have worked with love feedback and work hard to reflect upon and improve their instruction.

I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. I’ve taught for over 20 years in seven different buildings. This includes various grade levels in the elementary setting in the inner city, in military schools, in affluent schools, and somewhere in between. Over the years, I have realized a few things about what it takes to make a school great. 

Boxlight is excited to announce the spring webinar series, Transforming Learning in the Classroom, featuring five webinars to help you improve upon important professional development and STEM integration in your school. The presenters are all experts and leaders in education and technology, and they are ready to share their insights into creating successful learning environments.

The series will begin on March 21, 2019 at 4:30 pm ET with Innovations Bringing STEM and Robotics to Today’s Classrooms. The experts hosting each webinar have used and loved each of the innovative solutions discussed in the webinars to engage students and promote STEM in the classroom. The webinars were developed to help educators of all types acquire useful knowledge to help bring their classroom to greater technology-driven heights.

Collaborating with other educators is an effective method of professional development. When teachers have time to talk, connect, and collaborate, they can expand their experience and expertise.

In many schools, finding this time can be a huge challenge. Even if teachers can find the time to meet and talk, sometimes the group is not cohesive or collaborative enough to be very productive. And other times, they might not have a person in the school who teaches the same content or grade level. Teachers who want to plan and collaborate may have few, if any, options.

In some areas of our country, finding great teachers is becoming harder and harder. There are many teachers retiring, fewer joining the profession, and new teachers who don’t last more than a few years. We will focus on the third group here to consider what can be done to help retain new teachers.

For starters, we need to determine why people choose to leave the profession. After giving four years of college to the degree, why would someone abandon teaching in just a few years’ time?