The Teacher Toolbox

practical ideas for the classroom

Welcome to The Teacher Toolbox. In this space, I’ll collect all of the activities and strategies I’ve developed, adapted, and found for teaching and learning.

As I post new ideas, I’ll add them to this page for easy access in the future. Feel free to bookmark it and return whenever you need fresh inspiration.

This Toolbox is designed as a supplement to the two books Eileen Landay and I have written. The first, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts, was published by Harvard Education Press in 2012 and examines the theory and research behind our work while also offering a host of activities. The second, ENGAGE: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, published in 2022 is more of a handbook featuring over a hundred activities, strategies, and thinking routines. Here I’ll be offering completely new activities as well as further developing ideas we wrote about previously.

The activities featured here can be adapted to any age of learners. Most of my work as a teacher is in the areas of literacy development, language arts, and the arts, although more recently I’ve been working more in the sciences as well. Let me know which activities here have been helpful to you and your students, and what you’d like more of.

All the best,

Kurt

Building Community and Beginnings

I generally don’t like building community activities for the sake of building community itself—icebreakers that are fun but don’t really move our content teaching forward. I’ve found that we can achieve both at the same time. Here are some ways to begin the school year, a unit, or a course you are teaching.

• Rapid Bios— a quick, but meaningful way of introducing everyone in the room

• The One Word Wall—a solution for those empty walls and a fantastic way to build a sense of community and classroom ownership (via Tom Rademacher)

• 10 Words—What are our first impressions of a given topic?

• Sing to Me—building community with a complex text

• Inquiry Walls—designing paths of inquiry to guide learning (see this in practice with a unit on the Europa Clipper mission)

Comprehension and Content

Approaches for helping students read deeply and understand content.

• Knowledge Check—integrating low-stakes content assessments into our daily teaching

• Yes, and . . . —helping students to remember what they’ve learned

• Brain, Book, Buddy—a classroom routine for remembering content (from Blake Harvard via The Bell Ringer)

• Research Boards—giving students agency to learn content independently

• Tip of the Iceberg—a strategy for reading deeply beneath the surface

• Marking Up Text 2.0—an new approach to “marking up text,” building on ideas from our book Engage

• Framing Text—an invitation for all students to access complex texts

Exhibiting Student Work and Culminating Events

Here I’ll share ways that students can demonstrate their understanding of content. We’ll also look at how we can create spaces for students to show their original ideas and work.

• Infographics—an artful approach for sharing complex processes

• A Book of Wisdom—building a book of insights from our readings