Family Reading Night by Darcy J. Hutchins, Marsha D. Greenfeld, and Joyce L. Epstein offers clear and practical guidelines to help engage families in student success. It shows you how to conduct a successful Family Reading Night at your school.This tip presents an activity that can be used at a Poetry Family Night—Amazing Acrostic Poems.

Students and their families will complete an acrostic poem together. At the end of the time period, the Teacher-Leader will ask for a few volunteer-poets to share their poems.

The following guest blog post was written by PJ Caposey, author of Building a Culture of Support: Strategies for School Leaders. PJ is the principal of Oregon High School and can be found on Twitter @principalpc.

For the past two months we have asked educators from around the world to consider the question, what is school for if it is no longer the place to go to acquire knowledge. There has been wide variety within the responses given from some of the very brightest minds I am proud to call colleagues. This month we will highlight responses from Brad Currie and Brent Anderson. I hope you enjoy these two guest bloggers weighing in on this question—this question that just may have a much larger impact on the future of schools than one might expect.

The following tip was written by Annette Breaux and featured in her book with Eye On Education: 101 Poems for Teachers.

Want to know how you’re REALLY doing as a teacher? Ask your students. During my third year of teaching, I read, in a magazine for teachers, about the idea of a “teacher report card.” I thought to myself, “My students receive report cards, yet they never get the opportunity to evaluate me, to tell me how I’m doing as their teacher."

Dr. Barbara Blackburn has dedicated her life to raising the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. What differentiates Barbara’s 12 books are her easily executable concrete examples based on decades of experience as a teacher, professor, and consultant. Barbara has taught early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school students and has served as an educational consultant for three publishing companies. In addition to speaking at state and national conferences, she also regularly presents workshops for teachers and administrators in elementary, middle, and high schools.

In this video clip from "How to Tackle the Challenges of Rigor and the Common Core", Barbara Blackburn discusses how to raise the level or content in your classroom to meet the Common Core State Standards!

Teachers, coaches, and supervisors will learn how to help elementary school students build mathematical proficiency with the standards-based, differentiated, small-group instruction strategies in Guided Math in Action: Building Each Student's Mathematical Proficiency with Small-Group Instruction. Dr. Nicki Newton provides lots of actual templates, graphic organizers, black-line masters, detailed lesson plans, and student work samples. In this tip, Dr. Nicki shares seven must-have centers that can be used in an elementary school math class.

Dr. Terry Roberts has been the director of the National Paideia Center since 1993. A former high school English teacher from Asheville, North Carolina, he is a practicing scholar of American Literature and Cultural Studies, with a strong penchant for the classics. He is fascinated by the social and intellectual power of dialogue to teach and to inspire.

In this clip from Using Seminars for 21st Century Literacy, Terry Roberts discusses four strategies for coaching student participation.

100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign Language Classroom  by Thierry Boucquey et al. is filled with stimulating, engaging, and effective games and activities to offer students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This activity, Color by Number, is designed to help students practice their numbers, letters, and basic vocabulary skills in the target language.

In Teaching Students to Dig Deeper: The Common Core in Action Ben Johnson identifies the skills and qualities that students need, based on the Common Core State Standards, to be really ready for college and careers. This infographic focuses on one of these skills, problem-solving, and identifies five strategies that can be used in the classroom to help students bolster their creativity and develop their problem-solving abilities.

In Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges, Larry Ferlazzo combines literacy development with short and rigorous classroom lessons on topics such as self-control, personal responsibility, brain growth, and perserverance. In this tip, he outlines 11 elements teachers can incorporate into their lesson plans to maximize their success.

There are obviously many, many things that teachers can do to maximize the chances of an individual lesson going well. This tip shares just a few elements that research (and personal experience) tend to say are important. It is not designed as a universal checklist for teachers to ensure that every lesson they do includes every characteristic listed. On occasion, some successful lessons might not include any of these qualities. Other times, some duds might include most of them.

If you walked through a crowded airport, you would instantly be able to spot pilots and flight attendants because they are professionally dressed in uniform. That is because when you step onto an airplane, you want to feel like you are in capable, competent hands. But wouldn’t the pilot be just as capable and competent if he were dressed in tennis shoes and blue jeans? Yes, but the passengers would not view him that way. So the uniforms are intentional.

The following guest post was written by Rebekah Stathakis, author of A Good Start:147 Warm-Up Activities for Spanish Class. This is the fourth in a five-part series about classroom strategies for staying in the target language.

Even if the teacher is speaking almost exclusively in the target language, if the students are speaking in English, we are still missing the mark. As ACTFL recommends, both teachers and students should be communicating in the target language. How can we encourage students to stay in the target language even when they feel that it is easier to use English? Consider using some or all of the following strategies to help your students use the target language consistently in your class.

In our monthly eNews, we bring you the latest education news, resources, and classroom ideas from the Eye On Education Blog and other blogs we read. Click below for our favorite educational blog posts from the past month.

Reaching English Language Learners in Every Classroom: Energizers for Teaching and Learning, by Debbie Arechiga, is filled with practical tools, strategies, and real-world vignettes that will help you teach reading and writing to a diverse student population. The book features Mental Energizers, aptitudes that will help sustain your commitment as you work in linguistically diverse classrooms, and Strategic Energizers, teaching approaches that promote learning and engagement.

This infographic outlines how you can create a visually stimulating classroom environment to increase your students' literacy skills.

The following guest blog post was written by PJ Caposey, author of Building a Culture of Support: Strategies for School Leaders. PJ is the principal of Oregon High School, an adjunct professor in the educational leadership department for Aurora University, and he is currently pursuing his Doctoral degree through Western Illinois University. He can be found on Twitter @principalpc, and he is a guest blogger for many websites such as ASCD, Edutopia, and Test Soup.

A few weeks ago I requested help to answering the question, ‘What is school for if it is no longer the place to go to acquire knowledge?’ I received considerable feedback from a variety of sources that answered the question in a wide variety of ways.

New teachers are often afraid to ask questions. Said a new teacher, “I have so many questions, but I don’t know whom to ask. I’m afraid to look stupid, so I can’t ask other teachers. They’ll probably think I should know these things. Then my reputation will suffer. But I need answers!” Sadly, this is a very typical concern of new teachers. They’re afraid to ask, for fear of appearing incompetent. This is what they do not yet know...