In this Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Kristy Louden offers some practical suggestions for teachers to use as they give feedback to student writing throughout the writing process. The goal in delaying the grade is to help students apply feedback rather than see it as a final assessment of their work.

This course introduces students to the writing process as a means of developing ideas into clear, correct, and effective writing.

This article includes a menu of post-reading activities for use with any nonfiction text. Students spend $50 on their choice of activities.

Students will learn the potential costs and benefits of social media, digital consumption, and our relationship with technology as a society in the three-week lesson. This inquiry based unit of study will answer the following questions:

Essential Question: How can we use science fiction’s ability to predict the future to help humanity?

Supportive Questions 1: What predictions of future development has science fiction accurately made in the past? This can include technology, privacy, medicine, social justice, political, environmental, education, and economic.

Supportive Question 2: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are positive for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to make these predictions reality?

Supportive Question 3: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are negative for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to stop these negative outcomes?

(Thumbnail is a screenshot of the OER Commons lesson page, taken 7/26/2022 by Christina Nelson.)

Oral History Interviews that bring students together with veterans help to foster empathy and make history come alive. This lessons offers a step-by-step guide to doing an oral history project with Vietnam War Veterans.

This article assembles free resources from the Earth's Changing Surface issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

Mentor Texts:
“The question of humanness troubles the clones, as well as sympathetic individuals like the guardians. On Hailsham’s mission, one of the guardians Miss Emily proclaims, “Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being.” The liberal-minded guardians invested in the students’ cultural education not only with the aim of improving their quality of living, but also to establish that their lives were worth saving. Working against the rationalization of science, the guardians looked to the students’ creativity as the truer measure of their being human.” -Mimi Wong, “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a Masterpiece of Racial Metaphor”, Electric Lit

In this activity, students will record a list of things they already know about hummingbirds and a list of things they would like to learn about hummingbirds. Then they will conduct research to find answers to their questions. Using their new knowledge, each student will make a hummingbird out of art supplies. Finally, using their hummingbirds as props, the students will play charades to test each other in their knowledge of the ruby-throated hummingbirds. The purpose of this activity is to provide students with information on ruby-throated hummingbirds, provide students with the opportunity to conduct research on hummingbirds in topic areas that interest them, and to provide students with opportunities to share their knowledge with other students. By completing this activity, students will gain knowledge about ruby-throated hummingbirds. They will also gain experience researching a topic of their choosing related to hummingbirds and communicating those results in several different formats.

Emily Dickinson's poetry often reveals a child-like fascination with the natural world. She writes perceptively of butterflies, birds, and bats and uses lucid metaphors to describe the sky and the sea.

This article assembles free resources from the Energy and the Polar Environment issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

Deepen your understanding in the English Language Arts standards by reading research on developmentally appropriate practice.This module will include ideas of how you can implement these standards into your daily lessons, and allows you to learn at your own pace.

Find strategies and activities that you can use in the classroom that tie directly to the Early learning Preschool core standards.

Practice working with elementary documents by comparing accounts of the Chicago Fire and testing the credibility of a Civil War diary.

This lesson plan is the third in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video of the United State Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, reading the poem "Every Day We Get More Illegal" and a companion lesson with a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

Through haiku, students learn to slow down and become mindful of their natural surroundings, enabling them to capture experiences vividly through description. In this unit, students read and listen to examples of haiku, and learn about the history and structure behind this Japanese poetic form. They engage in both outdoor and classroom activities that encourage mindfulness and the exploration of sensory imagery. After writing, illustrating, and pairing their haiku with instrumental music, students collaborate with classmates in creating movements to their poems. The final project is a student compilation of choreographed haiku performances put to movement and music.

In this lesson, students will take turns using the Four Button Protocol to retell their own stories from Writing Workshop!

This is a short video describing what some of the aspects of the Fantasy Genre. It is engaging for upper elementary and lower middle school aged students. It touches on magic, other worlds, magic creatures, quest, good vs evil.

This lesson plan is intended to encourage learners to integrate the visual arts with science and appreciate nature. Students will create a round or square stepping stone using colored glass pieces with a mortar and sand mixture.

Written by Steve Poulter, it presents a different way of teaching writing to students. The method is “writing with the teacher present” or simply students doing ALL their writing in class. This way of teaching writing is more like athletic practice than class. Students practice writing while the coach (professor or instructor) was around to break steps down into smaller and smaller elements and to help them learn the skills “in real time.

This lesson plan is the second in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video of the poet Claudia Rankine reading the poem "from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]" and a companion lesson with a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.