Teacher Tips

Practical strategies and classroom shortcuts you can use tomorrow — grading systems, time-savers, and small changes that make a real difference in day-to-day teaching.

Small group of students practicing the Reciprocal Teaching strategy while discussing a book
Teacher Tips

Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Comprehension Strategy Built for Struggling Readers

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What Is Reciprocal Teaching? Reciprocal Teaching is a structured way of discussing a text in a small group, where students take turns leading the group through four specific jobs: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Instead of the teacher asking all the comprehension questions, students learn to ask them of each other and of themselves —

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Teacher and student practicing phonemic awareness through an oral sound-tapping activity
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Phonemic Awareness: The Reading Skill That Starts Before Letters

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What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and play with the individual sounds in spoken words — no letters, no print, purely by ear. It’s noticing that “cat” is actually three separate sounds (/k/ /a/ /t/), or that “sun” and “sit” start with the same sound. It’s easy to confuse with

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Teacher and student building a two-digit number with base-ten blocks on a place value mat
Teacher Tips

Place Value: Why It’s Hard, and How to Teach It So It Sticks

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What Is Place Value? Place value is the idea that a digit’s value depends on where it sits in a number. In 47, the 4 isn’t just “four” — it’s four tens, or 40. Swap the digits to 74, and that same 4 is suddenly worth 4 ones. It sounds simple once it clicks, but

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Teacher and student practicing the counting-on addition strategy with hidden and visible counters
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Counting On: The Math Strategy That Replaces “Counting Everything”

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What Is Counting On? Picture a student solving 6 + 3. The long way is counting every single object from 1: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 7, 8, 9.” Counting on skips that first count entirely — the student starts at 6 and just counts forward three more: “6… 7, 8, 9.” It sounds

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Teacher helping students build number sense using a ten-frame at a small group table
Teacher Tips

Number Sense: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Teach It

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What Is Number Sense? Number sense is a student’s flexible, intuitive feel for numbers — knowing that 8 is close to 10 but far from 2, that you can break 7 into 5 and 2, or that counting backward from 20 is faster than starting at 1. It’s not a single skill so much as

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Teacher giving a student specific, encouraging praise for their work in the classroom
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Behavior-Specific Praise: A Simple Classroom Management Strategy Backed by Research

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Why It Works Most of us praise students with quick phrases like “good job” or “nice work.” It feels encouraging, but it doesn’t actually tell the student what they did right. Behavior-specific praise (BSP) fixes that by naming the exact behavior: “Nice job raising your hand before you spoke.” Studies have found that this small

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Teacher encouraging a diverse group of students, including a student using an AAC device, during a lesson
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Maintaining High Expectations: Why Believing in Every Student Matters

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Why It Works Teachers form impressions of students early — sometimes within the first few weeks of school — based on things like past grades, behavior, or even how a student communicates. The problem is these early impressions can become self-fulfilling. When a teacher expects less from a student, they tend to give that student

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Teacher reviewing a visual classroom expectations chart with students before starting an activity
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Setting Expectations and Frontloading: Two Simple Strategies to Prevent Behavior Problems

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Why It Works A lot of classroom behavior problems happen simply because kids don’t know exactly what’s expected of them yet. Setting expectations means clearly stating, ahead of time, what a task or activity should look like — how to sit, how to work, what “done” looks like. Frontloading (sometimes called priming) takes this a

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High school students in a relaxed advisory circle practicing a self-awareness check-in
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5 SEL Tools for High School Classrooms

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Social-emotional learning gets a bad reputation sometimes — often because people picture something ideological or preachy. But at its core, SEL is just teaching teenagers practical skills: how to notice what they’re feeling, calm down before reacting, understand someone else’s point of view, resolve a conflict, and make a decision they won’t regret. Below are

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