Greetings this Monday morning. It’s March—the month of Spring Breaks—and teachers could not be looking forward to anything more after some long months to start the year. May your breaks be restful and productive for YOU, and may you find time to rejuvenate to make it all the way to the end of the school […]
Category: research
Build Your Bookshelf: Young Adults Literature and Their Maps
Kelly E. Tumy is a consultant in Texas, former president of TCTELA, one of five editors of the journal English in Texas. She was a 20-year high school English teacher, 8-year district coordinator, and a 6-year county-wide curriculum director. You can find out more about Kelly here or connect with her on Instagram @kellyreads_tx What draws your attention […]
Simplifying Synthesis: Fun with Research…and Clip Art
My AP Researchers are moving fast this year–they’re on a wild roller coaster barreling towards the Research Proposal Loop-de-Loop and it’s probably fair to say a few of them are already wishing they hadn’t had that third corn dog before they hopped on the ride. It’s okay though; they’ll all end up on solid ground […]
AI and I…and My Young Researchers
A few weeks ago, just days after I gave my AP Research students a stern but cautious speech about engaging with ChatGPT, College Board released a much-needed statement of guidance regarding the new variable of AI in the world of research and student writing. The tl;dr is this: Instead of ignoring it or forbidding it, […]
Google Games: 3 Quick Tips for Helping Kids Level Up Their (Re)search
Most teachers have grand aspirations when embarking upon inquiry work with their classes, but when they get to the part where the kids actually have to find out stuff…it all comes crashing down. What if there was a game you could play with students to sharpen their Google searching skills, as well as their research […]
Research Mini Lessons:Framing and Weighing Sources
Research writing has been a big part of my teaching for the past few years as I’ve moved more and more into the world of AP Seminar. In 2018 I spent most of my blogging time thinking about how to Make Research Relevant. That year and the years that have followed have yielded all kinds […]
A Beginner’s Guide to AP Research: Working Beside Them
Learning how to help my AP Researchers…by becoming one
Turn Local History into Advocacy with Three Different Writing Projects
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
Podcasts: A New Way of Writing
A Brief Podcasting Primer If you don’t already know what a podcast is, it’s basically a radio show that people can stream or download to their own devices. It’s like listening to radio a la carte in that you can pick and choose what episodes you want to listen to–and you have the power to […]
No Dumb Questions: Using Inquiry to Drive Research
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
moving writers 