Blog
How to Keep Kids Off Their Phones While Homeschooling
By: Scott Wilson | Sep 2, 2026
The most reliable way to keep kids off their phones while homeschooling is to agree on a spot where the phone goes during schoolwork, out of reach and out of sight. Set a clear return point, keep the work surface phone-free, and switch off notifications before the session starts.
Teachers have been working on this problem for a long time. Now it's your kitchen table.
Eyes down ...
Tracking Bullying Incidents: 20 Ideas to Use Bully Data
By: Jon Konen | Jun 28, 2017
Start tracking bullying incidents by logging every report with the same fields: date, time, location, grade, students involved, incident type, and severity. Review the log monthly for patterns rather than case by case. Those patterns tell you where to add supervision, which students may need additional behavioral supports, and what ...
Provocative Victims and 7+ Practices for Victory
By: Jon Konen | May 25, 2017
"Provocative victim" is a term from older bullying literature for a student who is both experiencing bullying and engaging in provoking or escalating behavior toward peers. Terminology and definitions vary across the research, and the label carries a real risk of sounding like blame. It describes a pattern staff are ...
Teachers Pay Teachers ELA Resources: 10 Stores Worth Knowing
By: Kylie Hall | May 22, 2017
Teachers Pay Teachers ELA resources are easier to judge store by store than search by search. Grade band is the first thing to check, because a store that's strong on kindergarten phonics won't help a high school English teacher. This roundup covers ten ELA stores across both ends of that ...
Using Technology in the Classroom: A Teacher’s Honest Take
By: Michelle Areaux | May 9, 2017
Using technology in the classroom works when the tool solves a problem you already had. School-issued Chromebooks and tablets, shared assignment platforms, and digital texts can shorten feedback cycles and widen access to reading material. The gains come from what the device replaces, not from the device itself. I spent years ...
9 Conflict Resolution Strategies to Teach Students
By: Jon Konen | May 8, 2017
Conflict resolution strategies for students are the scripts a child can use when an ordinary disagreement starts: telling someone to stop, using an I message, taking a break, or walking away. Calming down is often a useful first step when it is safe to do so. Safety concerns and suspected ...
Bystander Roles in Bullying: The Bully Circle Lesson
By: Jon Konen | May 8, 2017
Bystander roles in bullying describe the positions students take when they witness it: assisting, reinforcing, watching passively, or defending. The Bully Circle maps seven roles involved in a bullying situation around the student being bullied. Teaching students to name their own role is what moves them from passive bystander to ...
11 Communication Strategies to Combat Bullying
By: Jon Konen | May 8, 2017
Communication strategies to combat bullying work when they run in both directions between every pair of adults and students in a school, not just top-down from staff to students. The most effective schools build deliberate channels among staff, students, parents, and the community, so a bullying incident gets reported, addressed, ...
Quit or Stay? Battle – Special Education
By: Mary McLaughlin | Mar 13, 2017
Once upon a time, long, long ago there was a little school in a land far, far away near a lake known for its greatness. It was a school run by the Very Well-Regarded Entity and was granted the ability to exist by an organization which had a big stake ...
Teaching Character Traits Through Macbeth in Fifth Grade
By: Tricia Koechig | Mar 13, 2017
Teaching character traits works best when students separate what a character looks like from what a character is, then back every trait with evidence from the text. This fifth-grade class did it with Macbeth. The play is hard, the language is harder, and the dynamic characters make the traits impossible ...
Getting the New Kid
By: Mary McLaughlin | Mar 3, 2017
There are days in our teaching careers when all we can do is go home and cry.
In some cases we may cry because of what our colleagues have said or done, or we may cry because we have somehow failed our students. We may cry because of the stressors of ...