small group instruction

How I Teach Summarizing Reading Comprehension Strategy

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This post shares how Maria Angala, NBCT, teaches students to summarize text with purpose and clarity by focusing on key ideas instead of retelling every detail. She explains the common struggle learners have with identifying important information and offers a practical, structured routine using the 5W’s and 1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) to guide thinking. With simple scaffolds like graphic organizers and visual prompts, students learn to filter out unimportant details, highlight essentials, and write concise summaries. This strategy builds stronger reading comprehension, critical thinking, and academic writing skills that transfer across subjects, helping students become more independent and confident readers.

How to Teach Summarizing as a Reading Comprehension Strategy for Students with Disabilities and ELL Learners

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In this post, Maria Angala, NBCT, shares how she teaches students to think about their thinking using a structured metacognition strategy. She explains the shift from focusing only on finished work to helping learners plan, monitor, and reflect on their process, which supports independence and deeper understanding. By breaking tasks into concrete phases—Plan, Monitor, and Reflect—students gain tools to set goals, check their thinking in real time, and evaluate what worked. This approach helps neurodiverse and multilingual learners build executive functioning, self-awareness, and problem-solving skills they can use across content areas and beyond the classroom, preparing them for future success.

How To Use Instagram in the Classroom

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This post explores practical, creative ways teachers can integrate Instagram as a classroom tool to enhance engagement, communication, and learning. It highlights how Instagram can be used to showcase student work, document classroom activities, and connect learning experiences through images and captions. The post also discusses using hashtags for organization, fostering digital citizenship, and leveraging visual storytelling for projects like book talks, vocabulary posts, and collaborative challenges. By thoughtfully embedding classroom Instagram use into instruction, educators can meet students where they are digitally, enrich lessons, and build community while maintaining appropriate policies and privacy practices.