Excited about weaving noncognitive skills into your teaching but a little daunted about fitting them in with all the academic content you cover in a year? The Year-Long Backwards Planning Curriculum Template makes it straightforward. Using this template, teachers can map out academic content and noncognitive skills together, allowing you to backwards plan which skills will best complement the units your class studies throughout the year and how they will build on one another.

This resource includes the template as both a PDF and a fully customizable Word doc, as well as a full text overview, links to related resources, and a video guide to using the template.

Administrators, instructional coaches, and anyone in charge of designing professional development this year will want to check out the Professional Development Long-Term Planning Template, a companion document to the Curriculum Planning Template. This document provides a structure for school leaders to thoughtfully sequence year-long professional development for school staff. At Gateway, we use this template to determine the scope and sequence of teacher learning over the course of the school year; as such, it is specifically designed to be flexible and updated frequently depending on staff needs, interests, and areas of growth.

Click here for instructions and the customizable files to get started!

Reflectiveness, Adaptivity, and Support: How Teacher Agency Promotes Student Engagement 
Michigan State University

If we want our students to grow in their own agency at school, we have to walk the walk: this article details how educator actions and mindsets about their role in the classroom directly impact their quality of instruction and ability to engage students. By developing our willingness to reflect on our work, adaptiveness to student needs, and commitment to supporting students through their own challenges, we can become more effective, engaging classroom leaders.

The First 20 Days: Establishing Productive Group Work in the Classroom
International Reading Association

This article provides concrete steps and examples for establishing the norms of effective student collaboration early so that students can get the most out of their group work. Explicitly teaching expectations and skills around personal responsibility, respectful discourse, and collaborative problem-solving in the first few weeks of class provides the foundation for a year of sophisticated discussions and makes it easier to scaffold lessons for diverse learners. The appendix includes full-size versions of the text’s examples so you can easily adapt them for your own classroom.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into the science of metacognition and how to leverage the newest research to support your students’ learning, you may want to check out the “Learning How to Learn” conference this November 22-24 in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference is hosted by Learning and the Brain, a national organization that connects educators with the latest scientific research and evidence-based practices to improve instruction and interventions in schools, and will focus on “how the brain learns, ways to teach students how to learn, and strategies for more effective and efficient instruction.”

Consider registering sooner rather than later -- participants who sign up before August 16 get an Early Bird discount; special group rates are available as well.