Kelly Hogan

During Covid a lot of things changed overnight for teachers.  We were thrust into the world of online teaching whether we wanted to be there or not.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not a natural techie, so this sudden reliance on technology to do my job was huge learning curve.  I learned A LOT in the past couple of years about incorporating tech into my lessons and there a couple of tools that have definitely found a permanent place in my post-Covid classroom.   I use YouTube a lot in my classroom.  I love to start lessons with a short 3-5 minute video hook/song, I use longer clips to help with building background knowledge; and I use videos for classroom meditation, or brain breaks.  Naturally there are times when I need to share these videos via Google Classroom for homework/home support work, but there are other times when my students just really love a song or video and request that I share the link in our Google Classroom.  However,...

The last couple of years were stressful. There’s no way to sugar-coat it, Covid threw us all for a loop. Teachers were stressed, school Administrators were overwhelmed, parents were stretched-thin working full-time with children at home, and our students were forced to adapt to a new way of learning at a rapid pace.   Kids were feeling all the feelings! I have always felt that social/emotional learning (SEL) was a top priority, however it became really apparent throughout the Covid crunch that we as educators needed to make time and space in our lessons for SELs.   In 2020 I started to research new ways that I could add SELs into my elementary classroom on a daily basis.   I wanted to be sure that I was teaching my students how to recognize, name, and then manage their own emotions.   During Covid, while asking my students for what felt like the millionth time, “How are you doing with all this?”, I started to wonder if they even had the emotional vocabulary/awar...

  My school, like many, has professional learning communities (PLCs).   These group sessions provide teaching faculty the time to focus on key areas where we feel the need to do further research with the support of our peers.   I have found my PLC group to be really invaluable.   Having a group of my peers who I meet with weekly to share, reflect and troubleshoot has always been really helpful.   Last year one of the areas that I wanted to focus on was reading.   I felt that I had done so much work professionally to teach strong literacy and phonetic skills that my students had become excellent decoders, but were often struggling when it came time to analyzing a text.   I hated the feeling of asking an analytical question about a text, and just having my class stare silently back at me.   I decided to do a deep dive into close reading techniques.   Throughout the year, I read books, watched YouTubes, listened to podcasts, and read countless a...

Some of you reading may not know that I am a lower elementary EAL teacher at my current school.   My school uses a pull-put method, so I have my students for two periods a day, though I really do my best to ensure they are supported all day.   One of the tools I use to support my students is the WIDA test ( https://wida.wisc.edu ).   I administer the test twice a year to properly assess my students’ English language proficiency and determine where I really need to focus my systems of support. However, after a couple of years working with this test, I really started to think I wasn’t doing enough with the data, and I worried that my students’ needs weren’t being met outside of my room as best as they could be.   I was concerned that other teachers who didn’t know these kids as well as I did were struggling to reach them consistently.   I started to brainstorm ways that I could make the WIDA data more accessible for all members of my school faculty, so that as a f...

Hello, and thanks for your interest. Just a bit about me. I’m originally from Ontario, Canada, then spent ten years in Montréal, Quebec prior to moving to Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2011. My road to teaching has been kind of a long and winding journey, but in some ways I feel that everything I’ve done has led me to where I am now.  My Undergraduate Degree is in Fine Arts, which led me to Montréal to continue studying design. After a decade in Montreal I felt that had I accomplished a lot of things personally (met my now husband, learned French, lived in my own home for the first time), but I struggled to make a place for myself professionally. I guess that’s what happens when you graduate University in the midst of a massive recession!? While living in Montréal I studied for a number of years to achieve my French language proficiency certificate. My classmates were mostly immigrants and refugees from non-French speaking countries. We created such a strong bond with one another and o...