Thanks to a collaboration with musician and anti-bullying advocate RobenX, I discovered many strategies for reaching students in new and lasting ways.

After 25 years in special education classrooms, I’ve learned something our current education system doesn’t always want to admit: the most important work students do each day often goes unseen.

This past year, in a small Midwest community, we lost a student to a drug overdose. We have lost many more to drug addiction, and although we haven’t attended their funerals, they are no longer the students we once knew, while some are unrecognizable.

When the RCMP Crisis Negotiation Unit visited my high school law class, I expected some interesting guest speakers. What I didn’t expect was just how profoundly they would change the way my students communicated.

We ask students questions all day long, but how do we know they are actually helping students learn and, more importantly, getting them to think?

While teaching a Western Civilization course to high school students, I found a unique opportunity to introduce the topic of critical thinking along with the subject matter.

Teaching is a great responsibility. I teach English and believe that the ability to communicate, at a personal and societal level, is what builds strong communities and ensures ownership over one’s future. Thus, it’s important that we teachers spend a lot of time on our craft—deliberating the best ways to teach and make lessons fun, interactive, and relatable to students. Professional development thrives on discipline pedagogy and school departments meet to align goals and assignments and to discuss data assessment.

Languages other than English have never been top priority in the U.K., so when I was asked to teach French to my entire school, the prospect filled me with excitement.

It is not uncommon for a student to struggle with newly learned material. The question we need to ask is when does it become problematic?