Author: Brett Tackett

Discovering Lyric Lab For a teacher, sometimes educating students is a process of letting go. As educators, we spend so much time keeping a firm grip on a student’s path to learning. Working for the past few years with a student base that is 99.6% “economically disadvantaged” and difficult to captivate can, and often does, leave me exhausted at the end of each day. A rigid structure in the classroom worked for me for a time; on paper, my students improved. Test scores were up and I was confident that this made me a successful teacher. But I had lost…

This is the second post in a series about transforming student engagement. Check out Transform student engagement: Discovering Lyric Lab and sharing with teachers to read about the start of this story. Our First Student Rap Battle: A Practice Run After convincing the 8th grade social studies team to try out the unknown with a rhyme-writing project, we began our test run with our first period homeroom students. For 20 minutes a day, students were given a week to complete raps of their own in groups of three, the freedom to choose any social studies topic from class, and given…