Blog Posts

Imagine I said, write a story. That’s it: no restrictions.  Is that freeing, or daunting?  Now imagine I told you: Write a story; but you must take a real-life event from your past, and write it as though it were a fairytale. Does that feel more doable?  If you’re like me, the restricting conditions don’t make the task feel limiting or uninspiring - quite the opposite. They give me a starting point; some intriguing boundaries to work within, and a challenge to overcome.  That is what is meant by the term enabling constraints. It means setting limita[...]

by Adele Levin   Differentiated Instruction (or ‘mixed ability teaching’) is hard. It will not work for the teacher who likes to rock up as the bell sounds and leave when the students do. But then I don’t know any good teachers who do that. Differentiated instruction is, however, good for our students.   But let me be clear: when I talk about differentiated instruction I don’t just mean putting students of different abilities in the same room. That’s just grouping. Differentiated instruction requires a certain style and approach from the te[...]

By far, my most popular blog post is my 5 Tips for Engaging Students in the First Five Minutes of a Lesson. It has been viewed over 200,000 times since I posted it. At first that surprised me – like, fell-off-my-chair surprised me – but the more I think about it, the more I get it: good teachers deeply want to engage their students – especially teenagers. And this is no simple task. So, consider this my follow up post. You have grabbed their attention in the first five minutes... now what? Here are my five top tips for keeping them engaged until the very l[...]

I did my student teaching at a school in Cape Town, South Africa. It's an amazing school, with incredibly dedicated teachers doing great work with teenagers from a particularly rough neighbourhood. Many of these kids come from challenging home situations, have been driven into gangs, and subjected to drugs and violence on a daily basis. Teaching large classes (45-50 students to a class) in this school is not an easy task and was certainly an eye-opening and challenging experience as a student teacher. Many tears were shed. However, while there, I had the most i[...]