Tim McBride has degrees from Rochester Institute of Technology and NC State University, where he taught English for several years. His first book of poetry, The Manageable Cold, was published recently by TriQuarterly Press at Northwestern University. He works as a writer and an editor on Curriculum Pathways. He lives in Cary, NC, with an American pit bull terrier named Charlie McCarthy and a Catahoula hog dog named Junk.
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? I now realize the importance of students exploring concepts on their own so that they develop their own understanding. Teaching is not merely transferring knowledge to my students, but giving them prompts and tools to help them reach their
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? I used to be reluctant to rely on—or take risks with—technology. I now operate a paperless classroom and am constantly seeking new ways to engage my students with real-world-relevant skills and technology. What new skills did you acquire at
Laura Croyle has taught elementary school for six years and was a member of the 2017 Curriculum Pathways Teacher Institute. She earned her bachelor's degree and a Master of Arts in Teaching & Curriculum from Michigan State University. She has a passion for literacy and incorporating digital learning practices into
What new skills did you acquire at the institute? It exposed me to resources that help students build both content knowledge and computer-literacy skills. My classroom is a 21st century space in which students are always learning and preparing for the future. Having spent time with the math curriculum this
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? The teacher institute changed my mindset. It was a phenomenal opportunity for me to collaborate deeply with adults, ask questions, research possibilities, and push forward as I learned about new technologies to enhance student learning. What new skills did you
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? I’m much more aware of online resources to help my students learn. And I look for ways to incorporate Curriculum Pathways into my teaching to benefit all learners. What new skills did you acquire at the institute? I find myself
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? The institute equipped me with awesome educational technology tools that my students benefit from and enjoy. The team at Curriculum Pathways also consistently modeled an inclusive, welcoming meeting style that I now use with my students and staff. What new
What new skills did you acquire at the institute? The experience opened-up my mind to programming and the complex processes materials must go through before they appear in Curriculum Pathways. How did your experience at the institute match your expectations? I wasn’t sure what to expect! I knew I
How has the experience at the institute changed your teaching? It helped me see the whole picture of education technology. Having used Curriculum Pathways for over ten years, I knew a lot about the benefits it offered. But being part of the institute helped me to see what goes into
Working to reinforce the virtues extolled in our Writing Reviser, we’ve prepared a series of English language arts videos starring a lovable pit-bull named Muggs—aptly named after a dog owned by the famous American writer James Thurber. The synergy between the two tools has helped many students learn to write more forcefully,
The Byzantine particulars of documenting sources within a research paper and correctly formatting a final Works Cited page have frustrated students and teachers since the invention of papyrus. Worse, struggling to research the proper way to cite research sources steals valuable time from activities central to any writing class: refining the essay’s
Strings of choppy prepositional phrases often cripple student writing—especially when those phrases attempt to compensate for a weak verb, a tactic akin to filling up your radiator as a remedy for running out of gas. Consider this defilement of my first sentence: A common type of failing in writing by
A simple problem has long prevented students from revising their papers to correct mistakes with relative clauses: they can’t identify those clauses. Writing Reviser eliminates that problem. We highlight all the relative pronouns in an essay and present arrows pointing toward the word to which it relates. Students simply follow
Too often beginning writers revise their work without a clear sense of purpose. Sadly, that often results in a paper that becomes different rather than better, a process akin to someone blindly twisting and re-twisting a Rubik’s cube, uniformed by a larger strategy. The process can be painful to watch.
One of the easiest ways to lose a reader is to write a series of sentences with the exact same structure: “See Spot run. Watch him jump. Pet his head.” Compare that juvenile effect to one in which the student purposefully varies her sentence lengths: “Sitting in an expensive restaurant,
“Prefer active voice” may be the single most frequently dispensed injunction to improve writing. Strunk and White, George Orwell, and all student handbooks of the past 50 years extol the virtue of active verbs. But two problems often go unremarked: Students cannot reliably identify passive constructions in their own work.
Open the Statistics feature in the free Writing Reviser Google Doc Add-on, and you’ll see an elaborate but easy-to-read analysis of your entire essay. It’s the writerly equivalent of a blood test report, except that instead of listing your cholesterol level and lipid profile, we diagnose statistics crucial to the revision process.
Even for the most vigilant, experienced writers, clarity can be an elusive goal. Again and again, no matter how hard we try to eliminate any trace of ambiguity, an infuriating gap often separates what we think we are saying from what we actually say. Consider this simple exercise. Insert the
In my school days, I recall making a dishonest, last-ditch effort to explain an English-class delinquency by claiming, “The dog ate my homework.” Perhaps some teachers are gullible enough to believe this bit of gastronomic nonsense. But none of them taught at St Pius X School in Rochester, NY. That
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is one of those rare books people describe as “impossible to put down” that really is (figuratively) impossible to put down. As an English teacher, I found a marked increase in student participation when I substituted Capote’s “nonfiction novel” for one of the canonical works in
Virtual labs can be a boon to science instruction, capturing the excitement of discovery and encouraging students to think earnestly about STEM careers. While no one would advocate working exclusively with virtual labs, they can play an important role in expanding the classroom repertory: experiments that had been too dangerous,
Although most often used as a tool to refine an entire essay, Writing Reviser also offers innovative opportunities to isolate and overcome some of the most durable stumbling blocks to forceful writing. Let’s consider one perennial obstacle: recognizing—and choosing skillfully between—active and passive verbs. In the traditional approach, students look
Two of our most powerful interactive tools—Writing Reviser and Punctuation Rules!—become even more powerful when used in tandem. Indeed they are designed to be used that way. Both products use natural language processing, so they respond to each student’s own work, not generic examples in which the student has no investment.
Jumper cables, safety goggles, rubber gloves, a charmingly mad scientist, an endearingly animated and naïve student, a dangerous-looking contraption for “teleportation,” a boondoggle of frayed electrical wires—this unlikely mélange forms the set for our Spanish language videos—which follow the adventures of Miguel Del Mundo and his sidekick, Sabo. “Our primary
Gustave Flaubert said that we read in order to live. Common Core State Standards in English language arts are a bit less poetic than Flaubert, but they make something of the same point. They identify reading as a foundational skill and require students to analyze complex nonfiction texts to determine
Teachers can’t just give brilliant, isolated lectures or conduct fascinating, stand-alone activities and hope students will somehow connect these diverse components into a cohesive whole. To help students master the fundamentals of any discipline, teachers must build units of integrated materials that highlight essential connections and satisfy a variety of
In his widely praised Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, philosophy PhD and expert mechanic Matthew Crawford coins the term “virtualism” to express his concern about a trend in modern education, one that paints “a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave
[Update: In November the Reach for the Stars team was honored with the 2014 Hands On! Award from The National Braille Press.] Creating an interactive astronomy book for 10- to 12-year-old students—including those with visual impairments—involves managerial and collaborative complexities only a bit less daunting than those that govern star formation
Writing Navigator—from Curriculum Pathways—is a suite of tools designed to guide and support students in all four stages of writing: planning, drafting, revising, and publishing. We’ve recently released the final tool in this suite: Writing Publisher. It helps students put the finishing touches on their essays. That means documenting sources and proofreading.
In 2008, I agreed to foster an ominous-looking shelter dog no one seemed willing to adopt. He doesn't have any papers, but a glance at his noggin makes clear that he's not a greyhound or a whippet. He's an American pit-bull terrier. Although his well-armored head and fence-post neck suggest he was
