It continues to be time for end-of-year “Best” lists.

Now it’s time for the Best Videos For Educators.

You can see all my previous “Best” lists related to videos and movies (and there are a lot since I’ve doing this since 2007) here. Note that they’re also continually revised and updated.

Here are my picks from the second half of 2021:

I’m adding this tweeted video to A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES ON LEARNING ABOUT LEADERSHIP – SHARE YOUR OWN and to The Best Ways To Use Stephen Curry & The Warriors For Teaching Social Emotional Learning Skills:

 

The New York Times has published a great short video titled “It’s Quitting Season.” Any lesson on “grit” will need to include it. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About “Grit.”

 

UNICEF has begun a new campaign you can read about at What’s on your mind? How parents can start the mental health conversation with their kids #OnMyMind. The materials can be helpful to teachers, too. Here’s an excellent video they have about it:

 

Each year, I share the winners of The NY Times Learning Network’s contest where students create super-short and creative videos teaching word definitions. You can see them all at The Best Resources For Learning To Use The Video Apps “Vine” & Instagram.

In fact, I’m proud to say that they originally used a video one of my student’s created as a model when they kicked-off the first year’s contest. It’s a fun activity to use in the classroom, and my ELL students do it every year. The Learning Network has now consolidated many – if not all – of the winners into three separate longer videos, which will make it a lot easier to show several models at one time instead of having to click the individual ones.

Here they are:

 

I’m adding this new Edutopia video to The Best Questions To Use For Class Closing Activities — What Are Yours?

 

I’m adding this new Edutopia video to The Best Posts On Reading Strategies & Comprehension – Help Me Find More!

 

I was a member of a great Ed Source teacher panel in late August where a few of us shared our thoughts on this school year. You can watch the video below, and read an article about it here.

 

CNN did a short interview with me about one of my Washington Post columns, The pandemic is affecting the third straight school year — and this teacher is very, very worried. Here it is (you can see the transcript here):

 

I’m adding this new Edutopia video to THE BEST RESOURCES SHARING RECOMMENDATIONS ABOUT “TEACHER TALK”:

 

I’m adding this new video to A BEGINNING COLLECTION OF RESOURCES ABOUT BOOKS AS “WINDOWS, MIRRORS & SLIDING GLASS DOORS” – PLEASE SUGGEST MORE:

 

This video could come in handy to show students. I’m adding it to A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS.

 

I’m adding this new video to The Best Resources For Learning About The Issue Of “Learning Styles”:

 

I’m adding this new TED-Ed lesson and video to  The Best Sites For Learning About Immigration In The United States:

 

I’m adding this new video from Edutopia to Best Posts On Metacognition:

 

I’m adding this video to A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS.

 

I’m adding this new video to The Best Sites For Walking In Someone Else’s Shoes:

 

Jeffrey Garrett & Dr. Manuel Rustin host a must-watch education video show called All Of The Above.

I was honored earlier this year when they invited me on to talk about English Language Learners and the pandemic (I’ve embedded that show at the bottom of this post).

I was honored again when they asked me to join several of their other guests to share key takeaways we have from this wild year.

It’s worth watching the entire show (I’m on at about the twenty minute mark).

Below the video, I’ve pasted a more-or-less transcript of what I shared.

 

My biggest takeaway is reinforcing the importance of the principle of subsidiarity.  It’s from the Catholic Church.  Bryan Stevenson, the racial justice organizer, calls it a different term.  He say’s “get proximate.”  It means that the people closest to the problems are likely to have the best ideas and be most able to resolve them.

My evidence about this is primarily anecdotal, but there are a hell of lot of anecdotes to support it because I talk to lots of teachers around the country.

You had some districts engage with teachers and our unions – and with parents and students – regularly about how to respond to the pandemic and, from what I have seen and heard, their years proceeded with less disruption and more learning.

You had other district leaders who felt like they were the smartest people in the room and that there was little need to engage.  And, of course, as the saying goes, if you are, indeed, the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.   There were many districts like this but, unfortunately, a perfect example of this hubris was our district in Sacramento whose tagline, prior to talking about reopening plans with our union, was “We’ve thought of everything!”

Then they met with our union, and learned about everything they hadn’t thought of, or thought of far too late, like the fact that it was going to be difficult to do concurrent teaching with all the teacher computers that were ten years old.

You had districts who insisted on doing centralized efforts to track down missing students, instead of having local schools hire residents who had relationships in the neighborhoods to do it.

You had districts who just communicated with families through online surveys, instead of recognizing it was going to take a lot of pro-active outreach by phone and safe door-knocking to reach many low-income families of color.

On a classroom level,  I think many teachers, including me, recognized that if we were going to make remote classes work, we needed to promote student voice on steroids.  For example, I developed leadership teams in each class who led small groups, debriefed regularly, and made changes.

 

And here’s the previous show where I talked about ELLs: