Getting back in the middle school classroom is like putting on a favorite pair of jeans to me.  It’s comfortable and I know it fits me just right.  Yesterday gave me a wonderful opportunity to teach at Hopewell Junior School and 7th grade teacher Tracey Parks’ class.  Tracey had just finished teaching our lesson from History Alive! [...]

It was surreal; almost like going back in time. When I turned into the parking lot of Hopewell Junior yesterday, it was like stepping back to a hazy August day in 1992 when I began my first teaching job. I’ve been gone from here for almost fourteen years.   What will it be like when I [...]

As teachers, we deal with so many obstacles in our daily grind that it would be impossible to list them all.  But of all of the obstacles I encounter, the most annoying would be constant or unpredictable schedule changes. As high school teachers, we live and die by the daily regiment of set bell schedules.  [...]

Teachers love to talk about the Interactive Student Notebook. In my experience, nothing generates more conversation than the simple question, “How do you grade the notebook?” So we thought that having a PureGenius contest on the Interactive Student Notebook would be a perfect way to kick off 2011. Teachers can enter their ideas for a [...]

Professor John Krownapple (Johns Hopkins University) is a believer in preparing his methods students with hands-on teaching strategies and stressing the importance of creating a cooperative, tolerant classroom.  John has used TCI’s methods book as a resource.  Recently, he challenged his masters level students to creatively share what they learned.  Two of his students, Jessica Krasnick [...]

Nancy Bredin is our Director of Outreach and a former elementary classroom teacher. Do you have “it”?  I recently found out that apparently I have “it.”  A former student told me that I was her favorite teacher and more importantly shared that social studies became her favorite subject because of my class!  She recounted in [...]

I joined TCI in early 1993 when the company was in its infancy. We were churning out thick binders loaded with supplemental activities and slides. Remember slides? One of the early milestones was the publication of our methodology book, History Alive!, by Addison Wesley. At the publication party, our founder, Bert Bower, presented us with [...]

It’s more than just virtual field trips! As we all strive to create model 21st Century Classrooms conducive to learning in a digital age, more and more teachers are turning to distance learning models for a variety of lessons and activities.  Living in a college town with a great teacher ed program, I have the [...]