Best Practices in Writing Instruction Writing Like Readers, Reading Like Writers Nicole Godard · HCSS Best Practices Over the last decade, I have tried every trick in the book to help demystify the complex work of writing for my students. Graphic organizers, sentence frames, miscellaneous acronyms… I’ve tried them all. Students would dutifully attempt to give me what I asked …
By Suleyman Demirhan March 2026 | Education & Equity In my last post, I wrote about Belonging — the quiet but powerful belief that makes students try, persist, and grow. I explored how students who feel like they don’t belong pull away from learning, and how we as educators can send signals every day that say: you are home here. …
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Lesson Plan Samples: Through my research on Art Education, I have become a strong proponent of incorporating the arts into the classroom, and have tried to do so whenever possible in my History classes. This post will include several examples of how I incorporated art in my classroom over the last decade, in varying topics and grade levels. Sample 1: …
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Research and Literature Review Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) is a theory that developed out of the 1960’s when educators and writers began to see art education as its own distinct discipline (Smith, 1987; Logan, 1963). DBAE became an educational movement in the 1980’s as educators began to view art history as an actual inquiry-based process (Chanda, 2007). “The idea of …
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The history of art has always been a topic that has fascinated me as a historian. Art is one of the world’s most ancient tools of communication and it is a form in which we as humans can learn a lot about other cultures, as well as aid in forming our own identities. As a Social Studies teacher, I am …
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A teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs; A teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any …
Should we use Textbooks in the History Classroom?This year we have seen more radical change and adjustment to education than we have in the past 40 years. We’ve moved towards digital and multi-faceted approaches to building understanding, we’ve adapted and adopted new websites, resources and methods to our classes, and we’ve changed how we think about student success, engagement and …
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