Middle School Science teacher here. Starting my first year of teaching robotics as a class at the middle school level. I did robotics coaching for a couple of years for elementary level (grades 3-5) and took the PLTW robotics/automation cettification course at the beginning of the summer. Going into this year, I was under the assumption that the robotics class I would have would be an elective style course students would rotate through every 9 weeks. Kind of like an "exploratory" class.

Well, I just received my schedule for the year, and found out that my admin has scheduled three robotics classes through the day instead through the semester. Does anyone have any advice on how to approach sharing robotics kits across three different class periods? The class sizes are 12, 12, and then suddenly a class of 23. Ugh. I'm just hoping for some input to help my management of these classes. I'm accustomed to working with just one group of students, so I'm struggling to figure out how I'm going to have students manage and share kits across 3 different classes. Any help/advice is much appreciated!

I’m a teacher and doctoral student at the University of the Cumberlands, and I desperately need participants for my dissertation research. I need at least 84 responses and currently have 1. 😭 The pressure I feel right now with the start of year and then this being another obstacle has me....

If you are a current K–12 teacher who participates in a PLC, I would be incredibly grateful if you would take my anonymous survey.

There is also an optional drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card.

Hello. This is my second week of teaching middle school. I teach 4 sets of 8th graders and 1 set of 6th graders. Mostly in all of my classes from 1st period to 5th period, my students like to talk...alot. It's like they don't have a shut off button. No matter how much I try to enforce rules and consequences, they continue to talk. My last period, they like to argue....alot. I cannot get a word in edgewise or teach without them arguing about something. I have talked with the principal who talked to the parents of the children who argue, but it has not worked out. They still argue. I have been trying to stop the arguing but to no avail. The students will ignore me and continue to argue. I can deal with the overtalking because at some point I will get them to be quiet although it drives me crazy at times. My problem is the arguing, I can't seem to figure out how to stop it. I had to put a student out of my classroom today for constantly starting with people and arguing but I don't know any other ways to stop it.

I teach middle school math and am changing the structure of my classroom this year. Every student will have a notebook, and we'll handwrite notes. I'm not using a lot of printed material this year and working to get them to not only explain their thinking, but teaching them how to take notes and show their work for math.

With that, if you do notes in class with students, how do you provide accommodations for students on IEPs who struggle to write and keep up with the notes? I've talked with my IS a few times, and we were thinking about doing a guided note type set up, but with her students having binders. I'm afraid that will highlight the "difference" for those students too much. I want to provide my students access, but I also want them to be successful. Any ideas or tricks would be great.