Educational Pedagogy

We're diving into our top 4 creative and powerful ways you can implement right away to create that positive classroom culture you have been craving.

It's 8 am. Half the class is asleep, the other is staring into a cell phone. How do you turn such a dispiriting lecture class into a site of engaged, active learning?  Well, you engage the students, for starters! 

For generations, cartoons and comics have been used for entertainment purposes, but what if they were used for more? Today, educators are using cartoons as a unique way to spark engagement in the classroom.

According to Teach.com, “Emerging research shows that comics and graphic novels are motivating, support struggling readers, enrich the skills of accomplished readers and are highly effective at teaching sometimes dull or dry material in subject areas such as science and social studies.” Students enjoy viewing comics, discussing comics, and creating comics.

If you are new to the idea of using cartoons in the classroom, the first thing you must understand is that the terms cartoons and comics are used interchangeably. Traditionally, a cartoon refers to a single-panel image (such as a political cartoon), whereas a comic refers to a multi-panel strip of images. As you will see, it is easy to use both forms in the classroom to capture your students’ attention.

Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile.

“Let’s see,” he said one morning this spring. “I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical and real-world problems using a coordinate plane. I still need to get better at dividing multiple-digit numbers, which means I should probably practice that more.”

Moheeb is part of a new program that is challenging the way teachers and students think about academic accomplishments, and his school is one of hundreds that have done away with traditional letter grades inside their classrooms. At M.S. 442, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set of grade-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that they are ready. In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a lazily written term paper. There is no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later.