Hip-hop, a cultural movement started by Black and Latinx youth in New York in the early ’70s, is a great launching point for using music to teach. When used as a part of instruction, hip-hop can help to engage students, bring curriculum to life, and reinforce core knowledge and skills, including vocabulary support and reading comprehension. How can music be used in education? Hip-hop pedagogy, essentially applying hip-hop elements to teaching methods, gives students a chance to share their knowledge with other classmates and analyze experiences of their own as well as others’ in a meaningful way. It can act…
All too often, the development of reading comprehension strategies is limited to the ELA classroom. There are so many content standards to cover in non-ELA subjects, and it can be difficult to find time to invite students to read with a purpose and analyze subject-specific texts. But with a generation of students who are exposed to more written, audio, and visual content than any generation before, it’s critical to develop and hone comprehension and literacy skills using a wide variety of texts in multiple mediums and contexts. The outsize—and growing—role of video content in daily life and in the classroom…
Over the past two years, video’s role in the classroom has quickly expanded. When schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers turned to classroom video—including Flocabulary!—as a way to keep students engaged while learning remotely. But now, as students and teachers return to in-person learning, videos have remained an essential part of the curriculum. Teaching with video makes sense for several reasons. For one, students already turn to video as a main source of information and entertainment. Just think of all the music videos, YouTube tutorials, and viral TikToks that populate young people’s social media feeds—and our own! The…
