Opinion Blog

Classroom Q&A

With Larry Ferlazzo

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to lferlazzo@epe.org. Read more from this blog.

Teaching Opinion

Advice From Teachers in 7 Words or Less

By Larry Ferlazzo — June 07, 2022 2 min read
Image of a teacher in a classroom.
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(This is the first post in a two-part series.)

The new question-of-the-week is:

Six-word stories are very popular. In six words, please share an education-related story that you experienced and/or advice you would offer other educators.

Here they are:

Dr. Ann H. Lê currently serves as the behavioral and mental health program specialist at Tomball ISD, an external evaluator for teacher-candidates in Texas, and a consultant to Texaswide school districts in the special education assessment of Vietnamese students:

Mental health is crucial to everyone.
Give yourself permission to make mistakes.
Students are whole people, not grades.

Janice Wyatt-Ross is the program director for the Success Academy of the Fayette County public schools in Kentucky:

The foundation of success is failure.
Underneath the surface of success is failure.
Success is failure all grown up.
Success is the lesson that failure learned.

Jenny Vo has worked with English-learners during all of her 26 years in education and is currently the Houston area EL coordinator for International Leadership of Texas:

Teach with passion, love, and patience.
Give grace, receive grace, accept grace.
Effective teachers know their students’ stories.

Keisha Rembert is an award-winning educator who is passionate about anti-racism and equity in schools:

Teachers, please retire your superhero capes.
Curricular violence happens every day; stop it.
The students are the real teachers.

Anabel Gonzalez is currently serving as CTE instructional facilitator with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina:

Communication is possible despite language barriers.
Humor is good for learning. Seriously.
Ask. Never assume. Build relationships.
Students aren’t the only learners in class.

Jennifer Orr is in her third decade of teaching elementary school students in the suburbs of Washington:

Behavior challenges? What if it’s me?
Reflection is powerful. Pause, think, speak.

Thanks to everybody who contributed their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones are not yet available). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 10 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

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The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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