Dorit Sasson's Blog

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Now when many school districts are hiring teachers for next year, I'm reading many requests from teachers on how they can prepare for those teacher inteviews.

i actually think that the best thing is to ask the right kinds of questions that show you understand what is expected of you as a teacher and especialy those which help you appear both thoughtful and reflective.

• Do you have a school wide discipline policy? Do you have a mentor program?
• What options are there for assessing struggling readers?
• How do you deal with students of special needs?
• Do you have a specific textbook series or curriculum for this class?
• What duties outside of teaching are part of the job description?
• How are students assessed on report cards?
• Go to this site to catch up on the demographics, test scores, student-teacher ratio, school districts and any other particular piece of information that you think would be useful for first hand knowledge.

When I was first hired, I told my principal how much I loved teaching lower peforming classes. She was impressed with my enthusiasm for teaching children, which I believe was responsible for getting me hired.

Also, focus on communicating how important it is for you to make a difference in children, because that is what you will be doing for the next upcoming school year!

Good luck to all !

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Lately, I have been doing some catching up on reading news about new teachers and their impact on education policy. I believe I read something like the burnout rate for new teachers was 50% of new teachers leaving only after teaching five years because schools failed to provide a nurturing environment including the support of a long-term mentor.

I was doing a bit of reading on the New York City Department of Education website and came across an interesting news link applicable for teachers applying for teaching positions in the tri-state New York City area.

Mayor Bloomberg has recently developed a new school initiative with smaller classes and personalized learning environments.

If any of these teaching positions interest you, I suggest doing a complete research profile of the school. Learn of the mission and of the school's values regarding new teachers. For any teaching position which you are applying for, always find out if the principal has complete autonomy in the decision process of hiring and mentoring new teachers. A principal with too much autonomy is a sign leading to trouble.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

When you think about it, teachers teach students through the material by taking out the time to getting to know them and how to actually motivate them. I call this setting up a “live curriculum.”

There are just so many things about writing a lesson plan that is dynamic that you can only learn this on your own. Reflective teaching is applying classroom theory and coming up with your own recipes for motivating students and building effective instruction.

In the early days of teaching, I chose to not absorb myself with the pressure of standarized testing, rather to observe students and how they interacted with the material. I loved to watch them in various classroom activities, interacting during pair and group work activities, listening to how they read and what they said to each other. I described these experiences in my teacher journal, which actually motivated me to plan the next few lessons.

It became much easier to be more spontaneous in the classroom.Years down the line, students won’t remember the grammar tense or the laboratory terms you just taught, but who you are and meant for them as a teacher.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Many classroom teachers have to combine their teaching job with at least another source of income. Many do part time tutoring positions to supplement while others write about their teaching experiences.

Hopefully, you'll be able to take these experiences and write about them. What can you actually write about? Just about anything of course that is helpful for a new or seasoned teacher to read. In one of my earlier submissions I wrote about how a struggling ELL student overcame his language barrier and learned to love studying English. Today he is a very successful businessman at a high-tech software company in Israel. These experiences provide the slice-of-life lessons that educational companies like to receive.

If you’re still unsure how to transform your wonderful ideas and classroom experiences into marketable articles and blogs, try the following ways:

• Keep an ongoing teacher’s journal - Journal writing is an excellent technique for reflecting on your lessons. You’ll be surprised at how many ideas you can write about from just one journal entry.
• Read about ongoing research trends in education. Subscribe to teachers’ blogs and articles and read about their classroom stories.
• If your thing is to write more scholarly, researched based journals, attend a few in-service meetings and conferences and catch up on the latest hot issues in literacy and education.

Always read the online version of the teacher magazine first to get an idea of the type of writing and voice they include in their articles. Keep mindful of the guidelines and word count. With my cup of coffee, I like to find educational writing jobs here and here.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Yes, you guessed it. I'm in the middle for applying for teacher certification and since I'm right at the very beginning, it's not as difficult as I thought.

Well, wait. Let me correct myself.

First, I called the Board of Education of Pennslyvania and asked them the procedure since my teaching credentials are from abroad. They said that I would need to apply for a teaching certificate and I would need to pay to have my credentials and education evaluated, which I already did.

Then, I still need to have a health certificate signed from a doctor. I'm still waiting for that to come in through.

The packet will then be evaluated and then sent back to me. I will need to take the appropriate Praxis test and the necessary ESL courses for applying for a ESL certification.

I'm not sure though which Praxis test I will need to take, but I think it would be the professional reading and writing one. I have to double check on that.

All these procedures take time. If you plan to apply for a teaching job, leave yourself enough planning and waiting time. Don't leave your job search for the last minute.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Reading forums and discussions about whether to emphasize learning or fun at the end of the school year prompted me to write this post about when is end of the school year fun, really fun?

But to keep learning more on the light side, try experimenting with other ideas like themed lessons, which I like using a lot. The key though when using these end of the school year activities and fun games is to involve as many students as possible.

Even the most seasoned teacher knows that when grades are in, students are not the slightest bit motivated to study and yet, there is still a need to keep students in class and motivate them. I like the ideas on the Education World website. They are fun because they offer a different challenge to students and they can be easily adapted to other students' levels especially for those hot days when you perhaps have only a handful of students or a small group.

If your students for example are interested in traveling to other countries or are from another country, why not capitalize on diversity and teach them games used in other countries? Or how about a lesson on planning a trip ? Offer a competition (with prizes of course) to the best group who prepares the best trip under $1500 for x number of days for example? They can plan the trip using the Internet and show the class the daily and nightly intinerary. You might have brochures and they can prepare a poster using some of the information and pictures. The class can then vote on the best trip and voila, every body participates and contributes.

Good luck! Read End of the School Year Games for more ideas on winding down the school year.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Starting last week I experienced a breakthrough of ideas for various articles I wrote including students' gifts, motivating small groups, and party planning which all were part of my own new teacher experience back in Israel. All three of these topics were interesting in terms of my contributions, but the one that particularly spoke to me was a gift I received from a student at the end of the year.

It was a sweet note about how I inspired him and how he had learned so much from the lesson. The lesson was on Elie Weisel's Night and he was so touched and moved from the father-son sequences and he wanted to thank me.

For me, every day was a challenge to acquire the status of an appreciated teacher, from the pay, to the parent-teacher conferences, the quibbles with students, the staff dilemmas and the occasional confrontations. It's easy for a new teacher to quickly feel under-appreciated and want to leave the profession with a feeling of never wanting to return to the classroom.

Yesterday, I looked in my drawer where I keep treasured items and I came across quite a bit of handwritten notes from other teachers, students, parents. The memories quickly came floating by. I was in heaven. Often it is hard for a new teacher to reap up the success in the first year. It took me twelve years to get to a point where I could walk away from the classroom and feel successful and confident about my teaching abilities and my students and what I have done.

So please new teachers, don't give up so quickly. In the education world, patience is a big big word!

Email me, if you need any support or have any questions as you slowly wrap up the school year.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

As I wrote in my article Teachers Network and Share, the process of teacher collaboration is almost always taken to be a given as a new teacher, but it is an important skill which both new and seasoned teachers need to learn and develop.

Collaborative relationships also take time to mature and grow. In the beginning, a new teacher might feel a need to bounce off ideas and share information about student x's grades and tests while another teacher provides modifications and recommendations. While working together is a necessary part of teacher survival, it means so much more than cooperation.

I wish I had read Sara Wilford's article "Collaboration: What Does it Mean for Your Program?" during my first few years of teaching. She defines collaboration to mean: (the six C's)

1. Conversation: the act of people talking together.

2. Confrontation: the act of expressing an alternative viewpoint, which is helpful in leading to bigger ideas. This should not be delivered in an angry way by the speaker or perceived as a threat by the listeners.

3. Communication: the understanding that occurs when people are making ocnnections with each other. This can happen through conversation, but also facial expression and gesture.

4. Cooperation: the willingness to work with others.

5. Collaboration: the building of communal knowledge.

6. Community: a group who has built a culture of mutual understanding through collaboration.

[Early Childhood Today, Scholastic, March 2006]

Notice that the word "collaboration" appears much later on, which implies that a great deal of talking and sharing is invested until you reach the actual nitty-gritty work of "collaboration" itself.

If you are still looking for some coaching support, read Teacher Mentor, Teacher Coach and Free Ways to Support New Teachers for more advice and teacher survival tips.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I wished somebody told me how important networking and collaborating was during my first year as a Junior High school teacher. Teaching at the elementary school level in Israel, I was all on my own and I rarely was presented with opportunities for sharing except during in-service teacher courses. The minute I made the decision to transfer to teach middle school, I was all alone, this time in the cold.

I had one particularly good teacher friend who acted informally as my mentor as we discussed my difficult groups of lower performing students and together, we came up with possible tactics for overcoming the challenge.

Unfortunately, teachers' meetings were another story.

During that year, I was constantly taken over with the need to survive and carefully observed the management and work styles of other teachers so much that I didn't find my own voice as a teacher. At the meetings, I was silent as a fish. It was only towards the end of my third year, where I began to feel more comfortable and share a bit more.

What I am trying to say is this: teaching involves also a lot of social learning. There will be times when you need to be silent and just observe and that is okay as well. But never underestimate your own light as a teacher. You've experienced things slightly different than others and that is just as important.

If you're a new teacher, perhaps you'll find the article on Teacher Mentor, Teacher Coach .

If you're just beginning your first formal year of teaching, you might want to check out Teachers Network and Share as you learn the basics of collaborating with other teachers. Good luck !

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I'm just at the very beginning of understanding this entire issue of teacher certification and frankly, it's much more complex than I imagined. I understand the requirements for meeting teacher certification vary form state to state, but I'm also learning that certificaton of teacher education programs offered at colleges and universities are not enough for me to be "qualified" to teach at a public school.

In Israel for example, where is a growing dearth of English teachers every year, the requirements for meeting English teaching have become virtually nonexistent. The standards for keeping English teachers are disappearing, and many teachers are still not certified!

I checked the website on ESL certification in Pennslyvania. It's still forever confusing to me. When reading about the requirements for ESL certification, the website wants teachers whose degrees come from an accredited institution of higher learning (like my own) to complete a TOEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) test. Now, why would I need to do that?? I've prepared students of English to take standardized tests for 12 years and I'm a native English speaker. Sounds strange! I've tried to ask this question more directly, but without much success.

So, if anybody has any experience about teacher certification and ESL certification in Pennslyvania, I'd love to hear it. You can either send me your insights in an email or, via the comments section of the teacher certification article above.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

There no secret recipe for getting through classroom observations. Seasoned teachers are used to this 'shadow' but first year teachers are just getting settled. I remember the first classroom observation visit. I had prepared a doable lesson plan on phonic and whole language. It was an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) lesson for fourth graders. It was at a point where I was experimenting with various teaching techniques of whole language and phonics, which were typical of the reading wars of the 1990's.

Thinking I had perhaps taught too phonically, the English inspector categorized the lesson into three main ideas:

• student participation
• teacher preparation (lesson plan)
• classroom management
• organization of the English classroom

She didn't just hand her report and leave. She explained how certain elements could have been improved but praised positive elements as well.

From her I learned an important thing: always accentuate the positive; it's the only way you'll really grow as a teacher.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Building student-teacher relationships is a lot like dough rising. You need time for them to develop and often these relationships ddetermine the quality of learning outcomes.

You see, I'm spending a great deal of time on teacher forums and message boards reading a great deal about teacher experiences and they remind me so much of those earlier yearrs when I tried to impress my students (and myself among others) with a dazzling lesson plan. One big helpful hint I've learned through and through is to try and plan your own lessons first without looking too much for information from the Internet. I have learned that it can distract me from focusing on what it is that I really need to develop. Once I had a challenging group of ninth grade learners who had virtually little study skills. They were poorly motivated and there was frequent noise and discipline problems.

I was constantly looking for ideas on how to motivate them, but the real learning experience came when I opened myself to the realization that they thrived when I opened to discussing topics they were interested in rather than bringing in my own recipes. Becoming a great teacher is focusing on making your weaknesses (iework for you rather than finding that magic recipe.

For more information, please read:

• issues of classroom management
• issues of classroom organization
• quick and easy to implement lesson plans and ideas

Posted by Dorit Sasson

In order to plan an effective lesson plan unit, you'll need an abundance of tools and worksheets for teaching various skills and themes. As a first year teacher, I needed to know what was out there, so that I could eventually formulate my own ideas. Who says you need to build everything from scratch? And most importantly, why should you pay any money when there is so much stuff online?

I'm always on the look out for free worksheets. So, I think I have found an appealing site of free worksheet makers for a first year teacher audience. Maybe seasoned teachers would also find these free worksheet makers refreshing. In fact, you can surf on this site forever.

For starters, you'll need weekly assignment generators. Then, you'll most likely need to plan your lesson units. This should help you get started. Continue navigating through this free online teacher resource that I've used countless number of times for my own classes over the years.

When generating your worksheets always remember the skills you want to teach and any enabling skills that are needed before asking students to do let's say, a research project. You'll need to check-up on how well they've acquired their knowledge through a brief quiz or test. A lesson unit always has at least one small mini assignment and homework. You may want to implement a project in lieu of mini-assignments.

Best of luck!

Posted by Dorit Sasson

In 1995, I worked as a counselor for an English summer camp for elementary Israel children in an Upper Galilee town named Rosh Pina. I was also an in-service teacher at the time so I was learning lots of hands-on practical activities and tools.

It was good to see an informal side of education that I didn't see as a full-time elementary school teacher and not as a camper. Even though I had an entire booklet of information to help plan the daily schedule, I was expected to organize activities, arrange and coordinate events between groups. This structure complemented beautifully the rigorous world of grades, authority and frontal teaching I was expected to carry out.

It wasn't however until I was able to establish my authority as a classroom manager, that I was able to implement some of those activities from the summer camp days as a counselor. The activities included end-of-the-year games which offered a refreshing break.

Some summer teaching jobs have more of a teaching routine than others. If you're looking for a break from the classroom, it's good to keep in mind those kinds of jobs that can complement the teaching (ie. informal side) in some creative and interesting way.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

There are so many types of activities that give the impression they are information gap activities. Take for example, communicative activities. For some reason, teachers, both new and seasoned, seem to associate information gap activities with speaking when it comes to learning one of the language arts or ESL. This however is not necessarily the case.

As I mentioned in Vocabulary Learning Games, there is a considerable amount of planning involved in a 15 minute information gap activity. While it's true that students like working in pairs and speaking, that is not the only skill that should be considered when planning a lesson using information gap activities.

A task should focus on something, on a specific goal. There are many exercises that you as a teacher can do in order to foster practice of speaking for example, through specific skills. Such activities take much more time and should include maximum participation. Plus speaking needs to be balanced with one of the more recpetive skills like listening or reading.

In terms of methodology however, an information gap should be part of an overall pedagogical consideration in terms of how to cater to methodology by means of making it meaningful, interesting and flexible.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Effective Communicative Methods

The goal of the communicative approach is to have the student communicatively competent which means using the language to communicate, which is the most effective way to learn a language. Here are four major principles of communicative methodology for lesson planning.

Effective Communicative Techniques

Know what you are doing. The starting and end point of every lesson should be an operation of some kind which the student might actually want to perform in the foreign language. of course, this communicative trigger for eliciting students' responses should be tailored and adapted to meet the students' skills and abilities.

Example of a communicative activity: Asking open ended questions, wide enough to generate a variety of responses. Relating to current events could be a good starting point.

Communicative Learning

Learners learn by doing or in this case, speaking. Avoid random corrections of errors and allow students to share their ideas.

Information Gap Activities

The communicative information which is transferred is of the interpersonal (social) type rather than the factual.

Example of a communicative activity: Student A has pictures and student B has words, which when fitted together create a puzzle. In an ideal information gap activity, both students need to communicative and share information.

Remember: a mistake is not always a mistake. Grammatical and phonological mistakes hamper communication. However, a learner who makes mistakes because he or she is trying to do something he has not been told or shown how to which he has not yet mastered, is not really making a mistake at all.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I just started using Skype software development known for calling mobile to mobile, telephone, and videoconferences in order to recently teach Hebrew. Teaching languages online in this respect, is not dependent on online language software to do the trick - that is, if you can manipulate the technology to teach a language you know proficiently well to another.

I design the lessons around a few greetings and since the learner is a beginner, I introduce the characters, the vowels and finally I go over the meanings. I control the pace, how much I want to review and the amount of new material I want to present. The learner has the opportunity to ask as many questions as she wants. I can hardly say it is excessive. It gives my student confidence to know that she can finally recognize the Hebrew characters is a variety of word related contexts and ask questions about it. It's a very personal experience.

I send files via skype and she can relate to the instructions and explanations right as she's learning the language. We use the chat and speaking option so, she can match the print to speech, which is important for the early stages of language learning.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

When I taught last year in my school, I asked my studients how they felt about tests and how they made them feel. 88% of the students said tests created a great deal of anxiety and put them under a great deal of pressure.

Teachers for the most part largely overlook the possibilities of alternative assessment. I agree: there is one major area of discomfort, which is trying to find the right tool of alternative assessment.The best way is to start small by distributing questionnaireas around small tasks or even asking a mature and cognitively ready class that know your teaching habits what kind of tasks interest them such as group or pair work, research projects or portfolios. Finally, what topic interests them? Asking these types of questions creates more learner involvement, which is the ideology of alternative assessment.

Alternative assessment Tests

Kids make up their own test questions based on the material you have taught them. You provide a rubric for how you plan on assessing their questions. Kids interact with the material and become "experts." You then choose the questions and it becomes their test. They can also be responsible for marking it depending on how much control you want to give your students.

Depending on how open you are to the alternative assessment methods, you can also incorporate oral presentations, or other meaningful performance assessments such as projects and open your standard based curriculum even more.

If you still haven't decided however to incorporate a performance based assessment and still have questions or concerns about it, feel free to email me.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Perhaps you know by now that I am writing a book on early literacy and more specifically, on the phonemic and phonological awareness that English language learners lack when they begin learning English as their second language. Let me just begin with some of the phonemic awareness research which is especially important for every elementary reading and remedial reading teacher. For every bit of research, there are phonologial and phonemic awareness activities.

1. Research indicates that phonological awareness can be taught and that students who increased their awareness of phonemes facilitated their subsequent reading acquisition.(Lundberg et al, 1998) What does this exactly mean for teaching?
2. Review and practice phonemes must be recycled deliberately and creatively. See the phonological awareness lesson plan for details.
3. Simmons and Kameenui (1998) describe the "big ideas" of reading as the most essential concepts and principles in reading acquisition. These "big ideas" are phonological awarness, alphabet principle and fluency with connected text. Remember, in order for a students to gain fluency, it is necessary to review and recyle all letter-sound correspondences preferably within a word context.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Teachers are not always aware of the importance to use reading strategies such as 'think alouds" when reading texts. Similar to reading strategies, metacognition strategies help provide an initial response to new and unclear material that s/he reads. An example of this: summarizing content. For an ESL slow reader, a metacognitive strategy could be remembering five vocabulary words from a story just read and explaining their importance in the story.

Metacognition is basically thinking about one's learning. Additional factors to take into account such as the respective ages of the learning, the type of task involved and how well metacognitive strategies have been used in the past.

How ultimately do metacognitive reading strategies help improve reading skills? Basically, the more knowledge a reader acquires, the more necessary it is to organize that information so that it can be processed more effectively. As a former ESL teacher, I repeatedly saw that when I used metacognitve strategies, it structured their learning, so that they weren't simply passive receptors of knowledge and they knew that I was looking to hold them accountable. Yet there is a fine difference between testing their knowledge and facilitating their intake of information.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Before getting down to business, have you entered February's Giveaway Contest for teachers? The deadline is until February 28th and the subject is about success stories. I know you all have been experiencing successes in their own small ways. Let's hear those stories!

Success as you know already and especially with those hard to handle students, does not happen overnight. There are many problems teachers face and the road to success is based on various issues.

Reflective teaching is one way to improve troubled areas of your teaching.

• Problem identification: Is it really a problem in the class? Preliminary investigation involves asking teachers and ask students. A short route is using reflective journals to explore issues and problems. The bottom line is to ask yourself if there is change with students with yourselves.

How often should you practice reflective teaching? It's entirely up to you. Reflective teaching is not only about keeping a reflective diaries but also maintaining a list of questions that you ask yourself automatically once a lesson is over.

Reflective Teachers Study - based on a 15 year old study in Holland which showed that reflective teachers:

• have better relationships with students
• have a higher degree of job satisfaction
• realize the importance of a student's self-learning
• can structure experiences and problems
• have personal security and self-confidence
• are capable of seeing a bad lesson as a positive learning experience
• focus on the learner
• can talk and write about the problems and also the successes

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Have you entered January's Giveaway for Teachers? The deadline is January 28th and this month's theme is about 'successes'.

Since January is all about getting organized and setting goals, here are a few tips for using the advanced organizers in class.

I have been using advanced organizers for some years now. All of the teachers I have met over the years have committed themselves to it and agreed on its usefulness. They are effective in organizing what it is I would like to focus on. The students have a feeling of accomplishment while I can already prepare myself for the next lesson.

What is the advanced organizer?

Advanced organizers are useful for heterogenous classes. After teaching a text, teachers can present in a table form all different types of tasks depending on the text type. You can use some of the textbook's activities and/or supplement your own. There are different tasks for different students.There is room for a date, teacher's signature (for accountability purposes) and for pupils' comments.

How can you use it in your classes?

Once you are satisfied with teaching the text, it's time for students to work independently. Advanced organizers cater to various abilities especially with lower performing students who need that little extra bit of reinforcement.

Some teachers decide to give students a grade for finishing 80% of the tasks of the advanced organizers, but it really depends on the nature of your class and what you believe should go into a grade.