Teachers exploring their employment options may find themselves deciding between a charter school or a more traditional public school. While weighing their options, they might wonder which type of school offers a better combination of environment and opportunity. In the end, the answer depends on what the individual teacher expects, requires and feels comfortable with… Read More

Are calculators a necessary tool in math classes? As a math teacher, it’s your job to know when it’s right to allow your students to use calculators in the classroom or when they should do all of the math themselves. It’s a tricky conundrum because, on the one hand, you want your students to be… Read More

This post has been updated as of March 2020. As a teacher considering how you want to approach your means of instruction, you (of course) want to employ a method that is beneficial for all of your students. You want them to enjoy the learning process, and for your classroom to be orderly and controlled…. Read More

Interactive whiteboards — a board connected to a computer or projector with a display that can be manipulated by a mouse, stylus, or touch screen — have been slowly replacing traditional blackboards in classrooms across the nation. While many educators tout whiteboards as powerful and necessary tools that should be in every classroom, others continue… Read More

While the staggering pace of technological innovation has brought a multitude of opportunities to the world of education, it has also proven a great challenge for teachers and students. Two of the biggest issues that arise from technology-based forms of education: paying for gadgets that quickly become obsolete and getting students to focus on using… Read More

Today’s students are digital natives. Nearly three out of four teenagers have access to a smart phone, and so many students take them to school every day. For some teachers, it’s probably more uncommon to see a student without one than with one. But are cellphones in the classroom a good idea? Do they serve as… Read More

Students and teachers have been debating the best methods of instruction since the rise of the city state but few scholars have made an impact on educational methods like Socrates. The Socratic method of teaching is difficult to define in simple terms, but it involves a style of question orientated dialogue where the teacher takes… Read More

Rote learning is defined as the memorization of information based on repetition. The two best examples of rote learning are the alphabet and numbers. Slightly more complicated examples include multiplication tables and spelling words. At the high-school level, scientific elements and their chemical numbers must be memorized by rote. And, many times, teachers use rote… Read More

The debate over whether secondary and post-secondary schools should use the semester vs. quarter schedule has been ongoing for years. Over the last couple of decades the semester scheduling for all schools, specifically college, has had the lead because of students’ learning capabilities and other factors. There are a number of reasons why K-12 schools… Read More

Every child has the ability to learn, but the way children learn and how much knowledge they can absorb can vary considerably — especially for a child with special needs. Yet, as a society we owe all children a chance to reach their potential, so it is important to create the best possible learning environment… Read More

Grade inflation — a school’s tendency to give more A and B grades and fewer C’s, D’s and F’s — can potentially hurt students in several ways. Critics of grade inflation say it can: Make the reward for superior performance less desirable. Make separating superior performers from the everyday, average student more difficult. Complicate the… Read More

Tenure is one of the more enduring controversies of the teaching profession. More than 2.3 million teachers in the United States have tenure, which protects them from being dismissed without due cause. Essentially, tenure makes it difficult to fire a teacher without proof of gross misbehavior or incompetence. Understanding the history and key issues involved… Read More

Children all around America long for summer’s arrival and dread the coming of autumn because these two seasons represent the beginning and end of their summer vacation. Teachers, too, do not look forward to the start of a new school year, not for a dislike of their profession, but because of the added work that… Read More

This post has been updated as of December 2017. Love them or hate them, standardized tests play a major role in education today. Whether they are achievement tests measuring subject-specific knowledge or aptitude tests measuring scholastic readiness, the goal of the assessments is to provide a yardstick to evaluate student performance across state standards. But… Read More