Have you signed up for The Educator’s Room Daily Newsletter? Click here and support independent journalism! As teachers, we’ve all seen it before. You’ve taught a lesson, modeled the practice together, and then all the students get started. Or, at least most of them do. Sitting there quietly, hoping not to get noticed, is a […]

The post They’re Not Lazy: A Closer Look at Students Who Refuse to Try appeared first on The Educators Room.

“I find your lack of substitutes disturbing.” Read that in a Darth Vader voice the next time you have to take off, and you’ll feel exactly the type of difficulty that I mean. It’s been 6 years since I wrote my story about how “Lack of Subs Is the Canary in the Coal Mine,” and […]

The post 8 Tips So Your Substitute Plans Don’t Suck appeared first on The Educators Room.

 Melissa Childs is an Instructional Coach and a Special Education teacher at Salmon River Middle School in Fort Covington, NY. Melissa is a School District Leader certified and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership. A reporter once asked Andrew Carnegie how he had been able to hire 43 millionaires. Carnegie responded that […]

The post Finding the Gold in Each of our Students in a Virtual Setting appeared first on The Educators Room.

In 1987,  my husband and I moved back to our hometown to care for my parents.  Long story short, my mom had cancer that kept showing up in different places and eventually she passed away a few weeks after scans revealed cancer had moved to her lungs.  I had also returned to school to finish […]

The post The Late Work Policy Debate in the Midst of COVID-19 appeared first on The Educators Room.

Whenever students hear the word “essay,” they groan, eye roll, and plead for something, anything else.  Similarly, most adults I know remember high school or college essays they grudgingly finished just under the wire; late-night coffee, obsessive word counting, and a fair amount of teacher-specific bs-ing. It’s clear “The Essay” gets a bad rap, and […]

The post Rebranding the Dreaded Essay: How to Demystify Essays and Make Them Meaningful During COVID-19 appeared first on The Educators Room.

I’m here today with Jake Miller, host of the fantastic Educational Duct Tape podcast, to the man with the same name AND profession as me on ways to guide us on keeping kids first and using technology in our new, COVID-19-pushed learning environment, not to mention ways to apply this learning regardless.   @MrJakeMiller (Me): […]

The post Jake Miller Interviews (A Different) Jake Miller Re: Online Learning appeared first on The Educators Room.

My whole life I have wondered how people become radicalized. What prompts someone to follow what started as logical beliefs to a dangerous extreme? It has always seemed so irrational to me. Now, I think I get it. The current political climate is testing me, radicalizing me, despite my best efforts to the contrary. There […]

The post On Being Radicalized: A Teacher’s Struggle appeared first on The Educators Room.

I realize that I am a little on the eccentric side. I like it there, without the boundaries and regiment of the real world. And since I see things from a different perspective than most I also enjoy some things that many teachers find to be less enjoyable. One of those things is IEP meetings. […]

The post The Importance of Communication For IEP Students and Parents appeared first on The Educators Room.

America and the World Today It has been a difficult week for America and the world. American leadership in the world seems to be collapsing as nations considered to be our allies are criticized and nations thought to be adversarial are applauded as friends. The old world order established after World War II where the […]

The post [Opinion] Barack Obama: A Role Model for Teachers and Students appeared first on The Educators Room.

If you are like me you get very invested in your students in special education. So invested that it is difficult to release them to the next special education teacher. I teach kindergarten through third grade mild/moderate special education in a resource room, so some of my kids loop up with me the next year […]

The post Taking the Anxiety Out of Student Placement in Special Education appeared first on The Educators Room.