© 2013 One Way Stock, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio You might, or might not, be interested in an interview Kelly Walsh from Emerging Ed Tech recently did with me. We discuss student motivation, ed tech and teaching English Language Learners.

Why we are not ‘cured’ of racism is an important article in today’s Washington Post. Here’s an excerpt: I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.

This post was originally just a request to readers for suggested videos.  Though I continue to look for more, I immediately received a number of great recommendations and have turned this post into a "Best" list including videos. I write a lot about metacognition on this blog (see The Best Posts On Metacognition) and in my books, and help my students develop metacognitive strategies. I’d like to use short clips from TV shows and movies that demonstrate metacognition in action, and was hoping that readers might help me find some. This post includes several reader-suggested clips - and  can always use more!  Here are links to a few other similar Best video lists on different learning topics, like: The Best Movie Scenes, Stories, & Quotations About "Transfer Of Learning" - Help Me Find More! The Best Video Clips Demonstrating "Grit" - Help Me Find More The Best Video Clips On Goal-Setting — Help Me Find More The Best Video Clips & Full-Length Movies For Helping To Teach Persuasive Techniques (Help Me Find More) The Best Video Clips On The Benefits Of Writing Well — Help Me Find More Here are The Best Movie/TV Scenes Demonstrating Metacognition: Paul Bruno shared this perfect one: Here’s one from Krissy Venosdale: Jim Windisch recommended Sherlock’s "Mind Palace." Here’s a link to a good clip (it’s not embeddable). Leigh Woznick suggests this scene from The Princess Bride: Leigh also suggests this scene from The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon teaches Penny physics. The most useful part is at about the 4:00 minute mark when Penny tells him she needs for him to slow down: Metacognition researcher Steve Fleming suggests this Big Bang Theory clip: I’m wondering if the Beatles song "Help" might work as an example, too:

One minute after I shared my previous post looking for clips on metacognition, Paul Bruno shared this perfect one that I had to share:

The mysterious and bizarre saga of suspended well-known teacher Rafe Esquith continues (see Rafe Esquith Suspended Because Of A Mark Twain Quote? If True, This Is Insane….). Read about it in today’s Los Angeles Times article, Teacher files claim against L.A. Unified, blames controversy on joke. Here’s an excerpt: Mark Geragos, an attorney for Esquith, filed a claim Monday against L.A. Unified, a precursor to a lawsuit. The claim gave notice of class-action litigation involving scores of teachers in similar situations who say they have been denied due process rights.

Since I posted my request for video clips demonstrating metacognition a few hours ago, I’ve received lots of suggestions. I have turned that post into The Best Movie/TV Scenes Demonstrating Metacognition - Help Me Find More and added these to it: Here’s one from Krissy Venosdale: Jim Windisch recommended Sherlock’s "Mind Palace." Here’s a link to a good clip (it’s not embeddable). Leigh Woznick suggests this scene from The Princess Bride: Leigh also suggests this scene from The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon teaches Penny physics. The most useful part is at about the 4:00 minute mark when Penny tells him she needs for him to slow down: Metacognition researcher Steve Fleming suggests this Big Bang Theory clip: I’m wondering if the Beatles song "Help" might work as an example, too:

"How speaking multiple languages benefits the brain" is a new TED-Ed lesson and video: I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual Or Multilingual.

Thanks to Cindy Johanson, I learned about about this New York Times article today, Quartz Introduces Atlas, a Search Engine for Its Charts. Quartz is an online magazine I sometimes read, and it now has created a search engine for its charts called Atlas. The image at the top of this post you can see a screen shot of just a few of the charts I found when I searched "education." They have also opened up public access to its own Chartbuilder, which looks pretty easy to use. I’m adding it to both The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online and to The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics.

© 2011 Vassilis, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio As recent readers know, I’ve been doing research on metacognition as part of developing a new lesson plan. Effective note-taking could be an effective metacognitive strategy, and I thought I’d start a list of some resources and invite readers to contribute more: If you need it, here’s a simple explanation of the Cornell Notetaking System. 4 Popular Note Taking Strategies is from Exam Time. Note Taking Skills for 21st Century Students is by Vicki Davis. Learn To Take Better Notes - 3 Note Taking Strategies Compared Note taking Strategies for ELL Students in Content Area Classrooms Visual Notetaking in the Classroom is by Wendi Pillars. How English-Language Learners Have an Edge is by James Boutin. Some great tips here for effective note taking for students (& everyone else): http://t.co/RX6l4EQLGa By Claire Brown #eltchat #engchat — Reflective Thinking (@Refthinking) June 1, 2015 Desirable difficulty: Why we may learn more taking notes on paper than a laptop. http://t.co/gXcHkGwwqS @npr_ed pic.twitter.com/UKpK7ArAtT — Cory Turner (@NPRCoryTurner) June 1, 2015

Here’s the trailer for the upcoming film, "He Named Me Malala." I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Malala Yousafzai.

How Can Teachers Maintain A Healthy Professional/Personal Balance? is the new question-of-the-week at my Education Week Teacher column. Feel free to leave your responses here in the comments or there….

Thanks to the Zinn Education Project, I learned about a great searchable collection of social justice poetry that was just unveiled today at Split This Rock. Here is how it describes itself: Split This Rock explores and celebrates the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the centrality of the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world. Split This Rock is dedicated to revitalizing poetry as a living, breathing art form with profound relevance in our daily lives and struggles. Our programs integrate poetry of provocation and witness into movements for social justice and support the poets of all ages who write and perform this vital work. It looks like a great site, and I think teachers will particularly like that it’s searchable by theme and through other categories. I’m adding it to The Best Teacher Resource Sites For Social Justice Issues.

© 2006 Fabíola Medeiros, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio There have been several visualizations created over the past few years showing how people spend their days. I’ve used them in lessons where students have created infographics indicating how they spend their time, and then they compare their results with the interactives. And I’ve collected all of them in The Best Visualizations Of How People Spend Their Days. New data has just been released for 2014 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and both Five Thirty Eight and The Wall Street Journal have reports on it, as well as new visualizations of what the numbers say.

Wrote via Compfight The Best Places For Students To Learn About…Their Names is a "Best" list I keep updated and periodically use in my classes as a resource where students can learn about their names and the concept of names. Here are some new additions to that list: What your name tells us about your age, where you live, your political leanings and your job is from The Washington Post. The Chinese Guide to Avoiding a Bad English Name is from The Atlantic. What’s In A Name? It Could Matter If You’re Writing To Your Lawmaker is from NPR. The importance of a name is from The Washington Post. Find out what your name would be if you were born today http://t.co/UV2tw4CKz0 pic.twitter.com/erzfvw5XRF — TIME.com (@TIME) May 19, 2015 Want to know when your name was popular? Check it out on the U.S. Baby Name Explorer: http://t.co/eLGeI41gw4 #dataviz pic.twitter.com/1w3DNytLZd — Randy Olson (@randal_olson) May 13, 2015

© 2010 Tim Green, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio I just realized that, with the posting of another "Best" list yesterday, that the count has reached exactly 1,450 of them! You can see all of them here, and they’re categorized, more or less. And most are regularly updated, too.

© 2011 Susana Fernandez, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio My colleague Katie Hull Sypnieski and I have begun work on the sequel to our popular The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide. We have about 10,000 words done, and have about 70,000 more to go by our September 1st deadline. Thankfully, some of our colleagues are also contributing sections, so we should be able to get it done in time. I think educators are going to find it very useful. This will be my eighth book in eight years, and I have reached a firm decision — I’m going to give myself two years to do a book from now on. No more of this book-a-year business!

JSTOR, otherwise known as that disappointing place that a Google Search links you to when you’re researching something and find that you have to pay $35 to access a study, created JSTOR Teaching Resources earlier this year and sent out their first newsletter today. They’re making quite a few of their papers available for free through the effort though, for the life of me, I can’t imagine high school teachers using any of them apart from short excerpts (and that could be valuable). They do have some other resources, though, that might be useful, including an online course for high school students on how to research. It’s worth keeping an eye on them to see what they can deliver in the future…

Ways To Find The ‘Right Balance’ Between School & Home is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Educators Renee Moore, Debbie Silver, Julia Thompson and Vicki Davis provide us all with some advice on balancing teaching with a personal life. Here are some excerpts:

Thankfully, the Supreme Court today ruled in favor of Obamacare subsidies. Matthew Yglesias wrote a very useful, and short, piece on the decision that I think would be a great text for students to read and learn what reading is really all about. Here’s a quick excerpt: I’m adding it to The Best Resources On "Close Reading" — Help Me Find More.

The Terror is the headline of a column in today’s New York Times that’s written by author and professor Junot Díaz. You’ll want to read the whole piece, which is very short. Here’s an excerpt: I this his entire essay would be a good one for my students to read, followed by this writing prompt: What is Professor Díaz saying about what fear does to us and how we should deal with it? Do you agree with him? To support your opinion, be sure to include specific examples drawn from your own experience, your observations of others, or any of your readings. I’m adding this post to The Best Posts On Writing Instruction, where you can find other prompts I use.

Every month I make a few short lists highlighting my choices of the best resources I through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in post. If you don’t use Twitter, you can also check-out all of my "tweets" on Twitter profile page. You might also be interested in The Best Tweets Of 2015 - So Far. [View the story "June’s (2015) Best Tweets — Part Four" on Storify]

© 2013 Ron Mader, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio I’ve previously shared a lesson, and a collection of videos, I use for a lesson on perception in my Theory of Knowledge class (see Videos: Here’s The Simple Theory of Knowledge Lesson On Perception I Did Today). Today, I discovered a great series of short commercials with the theme "Don’t Judge Too Quickly" that would make a great addition to that lesson. Plus, they would good for English Language Learners to watch and describe what they see, along with learning the critical thinking lesson that it’s dangerous to make assumptions. First off, here’s a group of them together. The second to the last one, however, is probably not appropriate to show in class: Here’s another one: There are others on YouTube, too, but, like the one I cautioned about in the first collection, they are a little "iffy" to show in class.

© 2008 David Ohmer, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio United Nations charter, signed in San Francisco, turns 70 is an article today from The Associated Press. You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About United Nations Day.

I regularly highlight my picks for the most useful posts for each month — not including "The Best…" lists. I also use some of them in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see older Best Posts of the Month at Websites Of The Month (more recent lists can be found here). You can also see my all-time favorites here. Here are some of the posts I personally think are the best, and most helpful, ones I’ve written during this past month (not in any order of preference): "Ways To Find The ‘Right Balance’ Between School & Home" A Milestone Of Sorts: There Are Now Exactly 1,450 Categorized & Regularly Updated "Best" Lists! Quote Of The Day: A Corollary To The Best Piece Of Classroom Management Advice I’ve Heard Jigsaw Puzzles As A Language-Learning Activity Quote Of The Day: Carol Dweck On "Nagging" "Avoiding ‘Trust Busters’ When Making Change In Schools" Some #CharlestonSyllabus Highlights Study: Inductive Learning Promotes "Transfer Of Knowledge" Better Than Direct Instruction All My BAM Radio Shows - Linked With Descriptions A Perfect Quote To Begin A Lesson On Deliberate Practice - If Your Students Are Basketball Fans "Control Your Destiny": Positive Self-Talk, Students & Stephen Curry Questions To Help With Positive Classroom Management "Ways To Encourage Support For English Language Learners" "Jellybean Scoop" Looks Like A Useful Reading/Writing Site For Students & Teachers "Don’t Leave English Language Learners ‘In The Cold’" Study: "Authoritative," Not "Authoritarian," Classroom Management Works Best For Boys "It’s Been A Pleasure Having You In Class This Year" "Teachers: What we want everyone to know about working in our high-needs school" How Can We Help Students Feel That Theory Of Knowledge Class Is More Relevant To Their Lives Teaching Knowledge Questions In IB Theory Of Knowledge "Ways To Help Students Develop Digital Portfolios" Skype Opens Up Web Version To Everyone "Cash" For Good Student Behavior - Without An Exit Strategy - Is Not The Best Classroom Management System Nevada Legislature Goes To Crazytown With New Voucher Law Khan Academy & College Board Announce New Free SAT Prep "Our World Of Data" Is A Treasure Trove Of Infographics "Teachers ‘Seek Relevance & Choice’ In Professional Development" Here’s How My ELL Beginner/Intermediate Class Evaluated Me Useful Collection Of "Growth Mindset" Animations Here Are The Results Of Anonymous Class Evaluations From My English Language Learner History Class If You Haven’t Read It Already, "The Teaching & Learning Toolkit" Should Probably Be On Your Summer Reading List "Follow-Up Is Critical For Successful Professional Development" Did The NY Times Just Demonstrate The Next Generation Of Infographics? Google’s New "Expeditions" Looks Like An Insanely Cool Way For Students To Take A Virtual Field Trip