Creating a Culture

I often catch myself looking around my room and thinking, “This is awesome. This is exactly what it should be.” Granted, I don’t feel this way every day. There are definitely some rough patches and some whirlwind hours. The wonderful adolescents that I work with are bound to have a few not-so-wonderful days (both individually …

The Struggle is Real

My students are starting a project this week that I am incredibly excited about. It’s a physics project where they identify a real-world problem and design a solution to it. I’ve done if for the past for years, it is so unbelievably cool, and I cannot wait for them to get started.   Knowing this …

Students Owning the Assessment Process Through Rubric Creation

Ah, rubrics.  The favored tool for assessment by teachers.  Loved for their wonderful detail and their range of performance levels, rubrics are a great way to communicate expectations to students. Just like other teachers, I love a good rubric.  There's just one problem ... I'm really horrible at making them. I'm so horrible, in fact, that I've …

Bringing Science to Life

At the start of the year, I asked my students to define science.  Here are some of their responses ... Cool, huh?  They have a lot of great ideas!  Many of those ideas center around hands-on activities, which is awesome and definitely a huge part of science (in the classroom or out of the classroom). …

What It Felt Like to Have a Blank Grade Book

It was ten days until the end of the quarter, and my grade book still did not have a single grade in it.   The grades were coming, so I was starting to breathe a little easier, but still ... eight weeks in and not a single published grade.   At the start of the …

Announcing the Launch of keepushealthy.dps109.org

For the past several weeks, all ninety-three students in my sixth grade science classes have been working toward one common goal ... to create their own website. Finally, it's ready to be shown to the world!  I'm so pleased to announce the launch of ... keepushealthy.dps109.org   Their purpose in creating the website was to …