Acceleration - often opposed to "enrichment" (27), moving a student more quickly than usual through some grades, skipping grades
Active listening - from counseling, super careful listening with verification responses from the listener
Advance organizers - telling 'em what you are going to tell 'em
Affective - the emotional feeling domain, as opposed to cognitive or pure knowledge
Algorithm - pattern or recipe for accomplishing a goal
Assertive discipline - a popular program of classroom control, kind of old. See "1,2,3...Magic" by Phelan.
Alternative education, high school - a school for students not doing well in the "regular" high school
Authentic assessment - something besides a paper and pencil test, assessment that is more realistic
Basal reader - a early reading book for young children with a carefully limited vocabulary since such readers don't recognize many words
Bloom's taxonomy - an organization by a committee of their views of the possible cognitive goals of education
Brainstorming - group searching for bright ideas or solutions
Charter school - a school with a special charter, supposedly freeing it from some state rules and restrictions
Child-centered - as opposed to subject or curriculum centered. Mind set may differ from elementary to secondary.
Classroom management - class rules, procedures, and atmosphere leading to a healthy, safe, happy and productive place to learn
Cognitive - the pure brain, logic and memory part of learning
Compacting - "squashing" the curriculum down to fit in less than the usual time
Constructivist - popular approach to learning that emphasizes each child's separate mind and perceptions; the child is recognized as constructing the learning
Convergent questions (related to "closed questions") - questions that close in on a subject or goal, that converge on a target
Creative problem solving - formal and informal programs for imaginative group attacks on a variety of kinds of problems
Criterion-referenced - a quality of a formal test, one which does not score students based on comparisons between them but refers to an criterion, such as the desired learning for a high school student
Cultural diversity - emphasis on the value of different ethnic and other groups
Compacting - "squashing" the usual curriculum to fit in less than the usual time
Cooperative learning - group learning
Curriculum - that which is to be learned, sometimes including unnoticed things children learn, such as how to board a bus
Deductive reasoning - logical reasoning from a premise to a conclusion
Developmentally appropriate - recognition of students' ability given their age. "If they are in my class, they should be doing what everybody else is doing."
Differentiation - personalized instruction. This is one of Dr. Shaw's favorite words.
Discovery learning - allowing students to work toward recognizing something to be learned as opposed to telling them or giving them a written statement
Divergent questions (related to "open-ended questions") - questions that expand the scope of the discussion or inquiry
Enrichment - increasing curricular depth, giving students more details and resources
Facilitator - a manager of learning who works on the sidelines, like an athletic coach
Fad - education is so volatile and changeable that new ideas come and go rather quickly. A "fad" is the label used to indicate something that was hot and is now forgotten or ignored. Ask older educators about "Madeline Hunter" or in Wisconsin, "I.G.E.".
Good noise - the engaged buzz of students talking and growing, some of the noise curricular and some, extra-curricular
Hands-on learning - lessons or learning activities that do not require students to sit quietly and listen but to move, talk or use their hands to try things out
Heuristics - tools, tips and methods of learning and discovery
I-messages - from counseling, concentrating on messages about ME as opposed to YOU, as in "I have a problem with gum chewing in my class."
Inductive reasoning - reasoning from many instances to a principle, as inferring "All crows are black" from having seen many black ones and no counterexamples
Inquiry learning - discovery learning, often open-ended learning as when a student reads and learns about say, Ireland, without many specific, pre-set questions to be answered
Integrated curriculum (a.k.a. interdisciplinary curriculum) - especially popular in middle schools, teachers in different disciplines may focus their lessons on a common theme like the environment or the life of the community or the arts
Invented spelling - attempting to use some letters to stand for a word without knowing the conventional practice, common among young children wanting to write and impatient with the limits of their spelling knowledge
Math manipulatives - cubes, plastic discs and other devices for the hands to manipulate
Metacognition - stepping back from cognition, the subject of how we manage our learning
Multiple intelligences - Howard Gardner's list of several ways a person can be intelligent, such as musically or interpersonally
Norm-referenced - a quality of a test, one that scores students in comparison to a norm group of students who previously took the test, as in a score that purports to say a student scored like a 6th grade student
Phonics - working on learning the connections between sounds and the letters usually used to represent those sounds. Whether we should be teaching phonics or whole language or both is a big question to some people.
"Plan B" - sometimes, there really is a plan B, a planned alternative or back-up plan to be used in cases where the lesson plan, routine or original plan can't or doesn't work. Sometimes, teachers must invent on the spot, improvise or "wing it."
Portfolios - folders or collections of documents with a common theme
Rote - based on memory alone as in "I know the Latin words by rote only" implying that I can say them but I don't know what they mean
Spiral curriculum - the curriculum pictured as a corkscrew enabling a given topic to be revisited in higher grades where it is dealt with in increasing detail and sophistication
Standardized tests - tests that have been standardized, that is, given to a sample of a target population, say 7th graders, whose scores are to be used in judging others' performance
Teachable moment - a fortuitous or contingent interruption in normal activities to take advantage of interest and motivation due to an unexpected event, such as a tragic occurrence.
Traditional classroom - a single teacher with a group of students all facing the same way and paying attention while the teacher talks and uses a blackboard
Vouchers - special checks issued by the government to be presented to the school of choice to be cashed by the school to cover the costs of instruction
Webbing - connected labeled circles on a page where the links between them relate to the meanings of the labels, see the computer program "Inspiration"
Whole language - a term with different meanings, usually refers to teaching reading and writing in an interconnected way and attempting to relate the instruction and activities to the students' actual use of language. Whether we should be teaching phonics or whole language or both is a big question to some people.