Two Teachers Podcast

We have a combined 20 years of teaching experience. We've presented to teachers from all over the country and taught or coached a couple thousand students. We are reflective and constantly honing our craft. This episode focuses on just a couple "Magic Words" that we use daily to positively affect our student lives and learning. Listen to our 5 favorite transformative phrases.

We love tech AND when we come across some instructional tech that has transformed our students learning and our teaching. Sutori.com is that tool right now. The awesome creators of Sutori have shared a promo code with us too. You can get $20 off a subscription by typing in twenty in the promo box. Sutori offers the ability to make what they call "Stories." These stories look like a timeline, but allow for embedding so many features. You can use items from quiz questions and forums for audience participation to embedding Quizizz, other GoogleSlide presentations, pictures, etc. Have a listen to the ways we are using this in our classroom and why it is worth the subscription. Additionally we talk about how you can earn a scholarship from Sutori to pay for the subscription too by becoming a Sutori Storyteller. The features of this platform are endless. When creating a timeline use all of these features to enhance your presentation and challenge your audience. Screenshot of the options you will see when adding to your timeline.

The start of the year comes with some reflection of the summer and goal setting for the coming days of class ahead. On this episode, we think back to our #PDdecathlon and highlight Luke's Infographic Syallabus and Tom's World War II rap. We look ahead to the year and discuss what it means to collaborate with colleagues and better our retake policies. Those discussions stem from our own goals for the year. Join us and establish some of your own.

Summer sometimes leads to what Elena Aguilar in the book Onward calls “Sad Sunday.” Sad Sunday is that feeling on Sunday night that we all have when we did not accomplish any of our teacher to do list and look at Monday as a daunting return to the work week. Similarly, we set out on our summer journey with lofty goals of transforming our curriculum on our 2-3 month break yet accomplish very little. We return rested, but not deeper on our to do list. For this we created the #PDdecathlon. This is a short yet potentially challenging list of 10 tasks that will help you grow over the summer.

Inclusion is a phrase kicked around often in education. We as podcasters will attack this topic in a future episode. Today's episode addresses a different side of inclusion. One that is essential as well. Ryan Brown, an ELL teacher from Harlem Middle School, joins us to address the tangible ways that we MUST include these English Language learning students in our own class and use their strengths rather than dwelling on their deficiencies. For More information on Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills vs. Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, Click Here

On this week's episode we are joined by another substitute podcaster. This week it is Adam Jensen from Pilgrim Park Middle School. Adam works as a TLS in the building mostly centered on being an instructional coach as well as the many hats that he wears. One of his primary areas of expertise is BreakoutEDU. He is a frequent recipient of grants centered on this gamified world of education. He shares some entry-level strategies to take the daunting feel out of trying this in your own classroom. Why Breakout? When Adam was a kid, he was always fascinated by the ideas of mystery. Breakout is one of those things that will deliver that mystery and that puzzle solving ability. I'm overwhelmed, if I am entering this from the floor and I want to reach the ceiling, what do I do? Where do I start? Where do I go? You got to start simple. Purchase a riddle box or a mystery box. Start playing with some of those things and then you can start looking at them and you start to focus on how can you trick yourself and others into finding something. The goal of this whole experiment was kids were asked to focus on learning targets. Kids don't really care about learning targets for the most part. And so we wanted to find a way to help them care. Therefore, we thought, what if we put the learning targets inside of some sort of a mystery compartment or a locker? They needed to solve a mystery in order to figure out what it was they were going to learn about. Okay, that it might engage them to a different level. Strategies for using a breakout box So I have used these in teaching fractions for the past couple of years. I start by giving the kids a scenario. In the scenario we are trying to save my dog. I told them that we were 3/5 of a mile away from the hideout and the dog thief was catching up to us at at about one third of a mile faster than what we were running, would we make it to our hideout in time to be safe. Put hidden messages on the back of plain cards in invisible ink, and then have them try to find whatever this message would state using U.V. light or a black light. Hide small, special secret messages inside of a flashlight battery compartment. Using Google Forms is an easy place to start or add to an existing breakout. Use the answer validation feature to require the correct answer before moving on. Make History Fun has some awesome created break outs that use these features. Now, I've also heard that if you Google the stuff, there are some pre-created ones. I know it's getting a little harder to find them for free because a lot of this has been monetized.

As teachers we are constantly influenced by those in the profession and those in our lives. We take an opportunity to celebrate our tenth show by acknowledging those top ten influences in our lives. We will cover those in the podcasting/Twitter world, those authors/presenters we constantly quote and those a bit more personal to our world. Join us and reflect on your own influencers. Maybe you will make some of ours yours. Our Top 10 Our spouses and families- They are the people that know that we were made for this. They truly believe that our students need us and are willing to give up some of their time with them outside of our contractual hours, to allow us to positively impact our students lives.@twoguysde (https://pedalogical.org) - These guys are a phenomenal follow for educators and leaders looking for inspiration. Their positive views of education are an inspiration every time they pop up on our twitter feed!Previous Educators - These are the teachers that we had in our years of schooling, which we strive to be for our students. That one or two (hopefully more) teacher(s) that hooked you and made you feel as though your presence in their class was valued daily. Or maybe they were just entertaining and they made you love their class. Positive Colleagues - These are the people that stop in to share good news, ask how your weekend was, or just share a funny story about their students. They sure notice when you're in a funk, and their presence alone in a quick conversation reminds you why were there! YOU ROCK!Random Refocus Strategy - For Tom it is making "2 Minute Reviews" on YouTube and for Luke it is reading student letters and watching corny teaching movies. What gets you reenergized and refocused? Please share your ideas in the comments! @BrianMendler - Need help getting through to your toughest students? This educator has it down to a science! He is a must follow on social media and has a great book titled: Discipline with Dignity http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/118018/chapters/Introduction@-What-Is-Discipline-with-Dignity¢.aspx@Gcouros - @Brewerhm - A breath of fresh air! Hailing from New Zealand, Hamish Brewer is a RELENTLESS principal. He is currently motivating his students at Fred Lynn Middle School in Woodbridge, Virginia and he will blow your mind with his approach to bettering his students educational experience. He will make you want to run to your classroom and start shaking things up immediately. @RickWormeli2 - Rick is a genius when it comes to Standards Based Grading and properly assessing students (among other things). He is a must follow on social media. We've both had the good fortune of experiencing a Wormeli presentation and both feel he is an excellent speaker and presenter! Get online and watch some of his videos or find a way to see him present. It will make you a better teacher! @AudacityToPodcast -

On this episode we investigate simple ways to help guide our students towards asking better questions. In today’s world students are bombarded with information at their fingertips and have lost the desire to inquire. We have solutions to reignite that desire in your classroom. Inquiry is not just asking questions. Is driving investigation through questioning to reach a deeper understanding. This type of framework can be found in C3 and NGSS. For example in NGSS It is Asking Questions and Defining Problems, Developing and Using Models, Planning and Carrying Out Investigations, Analyzing and Interpreting Data. In math the model is obvious in the problem solving process especially in the current wave of math instruction that encourages multiple ways of solving or thinking about a problem. I hear math teachers all the time ask students to demonstrate how the individual solved the problem and then discuss why one way could be better than the other. That never happened in my experience as a student in math classes. We were taught how to solve and expected to replicate the process. Additionally in any subject we can ask two standard questions of inquiry: How do we know? and Who cares? The capacity must be built. I personally like the Stripling model of inquiry to drive the understanding because it is not a linear process. Its messy. Connect, Wonder, Investigate, Construct, Express, Reflect. So how do we create this atmosphere in our classrooms? The biggest problem is that the students do not have the capacity to ask questions. Most recently students are much more comfortable being asked questions. Utilizing the DOK Charts and Costas Levels Is a good start but using Luke favorite the complex question matrix can create a fun approach. Luke also developed a inquiry box. A great low floor high ceiling activity is to kick off inquiry with the old school QAR - Question Answer Relationships. This is great for primary source analysis, all literacy content related or literature, hypothesizing in math and science. How might? What might? What do you think? type questions.

In all teaching, assessing prior knowledge is a essential. Most often the "pre-test" lacks authenticity and is cumbersome. It frequently assesses what student don't know rather than what they know. In this episode we explore some strategies to escape the monotony of multiple choice pre-assessments that might evaluate how well they guess rather than what they truly know. We discuss a strategy called "Brain Dump" as a way to both assess prior knowledge, but activate it too. As a S/O to Episode 2 we share how it operates as an effective "hook" as well.

Luke is gone this week tending to his responsibility as a basketball coach. The first ¨substitute¨ podcaster is Cathy Holway from Combs Elementary in the Ferguson-Florissant School District of Missouri. She joins us and share her knowledge and an example of Project-Based Learning. Her example is an amazing creation based on 4th grade math standards answering the question: How can we as entrepreneurs develop a pizza company within a specified budget?