For several years, I regularly wrote posts for The NY Times Learning Network on teaching English Language Learners.

You can see all of them at ALL MY NY TIMES POSTS FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS – LINKED WITH DESCRIPTIONS.

On a lark, I asked ChatGPT to come up with fictional book blurbs endorsing our latest book, The Better Teacher’s Toolbox.

Here’s what it came up with:

E.T.

“Teachers… phone home… and tell everyone to get The Better Teachers Toolbox. Even an alien can learn something.”

Tony Soprano

“Lemme tell you something. Running a classroom? Tougher than running certain… family businesses. This book? It earns respect.”

Chewbacca

“Rrraaaaghhh! Rrroooaaarrrgh! (Translation: ‘Even on Kashyyyk, we’d use these strategies. Five Wookiee stars.’)”

Dr. Strange

“I looked across millions of possible classrooms. In the best ones, someone had this book.”

Sherlock Holmes

“Elementary. The evidence overwhelmingly supports reading The Better Teachers Toolbox.”

Yoda

“Teach better, you will. Read this book, you should.”

Captain Picard

“Make it so. Better instruction begins on page one.”

The Terminator

“I’ll be back… to borrow this book again.”

Darth Vader

“The ability to manage the galaxy is insignificant next to the power contained in The Better Teachers Toolbox.”

Forrest Gump

“Teaching’s kind of like a box of lesson plans. This book helps you know what you’re gonna get.”

Spock

“It is only logical that every educator own this volume.”

I’ve begun this weekly post where I’ll be sharing resources I’m adding to The Best Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Resources or other related “Best” lists.

Also, check out “Best” Lists Of The Week: Social Emotional Learning Resources.

Here are this week’s picks:

I’m adding this post to The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures:

Give Your Kid the Gift of Failure www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 6:30 AM

The power of culture: Why the Patriots quoted a 1979 film on the road to the Super Bowl is an interesting NY Times piece on rituals. I’m adding it to The Differences Between “Rituals” & “Routines” In The Classroom, & Why We Need Both.

New study finds the words to show you care is from BPS. I’m adding it to THE BEST RESOURCES SHARING RECOMMENDATIONS ABOUT “TEACHER TALK” and to The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones.

I’m adding this infographic to The Best Sites For Learning About The World’s Different Cultures:

You will find more infographics at Statista

Trust: Teaching the Good Stuff, Part 2 is from Stacey Johnson. I’m adding it to The Best Posts About Trust & Education.

Kid Citizen is a free site designed for students to learn with primary sources.

It says its focus is K-5, but I think it could be useful with older students, too, – particularly English Language Learners.

It’s filled with interactive videos and, on top of that, teachers can also create their own interactives, share them with students, and monitor student progress through a sort of virtual classroom.

I’m adding it to:

The Best Resources For Using Primary Sources

The Best Sites Where Students Can Work Independently & Let Teachers Check On Progress

Wayground/Quizziz is on tons of my “Best” lists, and I’ve published many posts about it over the years.

They just shared a video about some new features – I’m intrigued by the games, less excited about its AI grading worksheets (not thrilled about worksheet use, nor about teachers having AI grade anything beyond learning games):

Today is Navajo Code Talkers Day.

You might be interested in The Best Resources For Learning About The Code Talkers.

I’ve made many videos over the years, including quite a few animated ones with Education Week on differentiated instruction, learning transfer, and student motivation.

You can see thirty of them all here.

I’ve also made about more on TikTok, which you can see here.

I’ve begun uploading those TikTok videos to my YouTube Channel, which you can access here.

TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay

You may, or may not, have heard about the recent national meeting of students who put together their version of a national framework for schools to use on Artificial Intelligence policy.

You can read about it at this NPR article, Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out, and at this Education Week piece.

When I was in the classroom, I had students complete a three-week unit (that link leads to a first draft of what that looked like) with a culminating project of their creating guidelines in small groups.  We then identified commonalities and decided on appropriate class guidelines.  I did that the first year ChatGPT came out near the end of the school year.  The following year I just announced those guidelines and implemented them and they worked well though, in retrospect, I would do this whole exercise at the beginning of each school year.

Yes, it’s time-consuming, but its benefits, including its literacy and student agency opportunities seems to me to make it worthwhile.

I’m adding this info to A Beginning List Of Different Types Of Guidance Educators Are Giving Students About AI Use In Their Classes.

The United Nations has declared August 23rd to be International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition.

You can find many related resources at their website.

You might also be interested in USEFUL RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF BRINGING ENSLAVED AFRICANS TO AMERICA and A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ABOUT REPARATIONS

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here.

You can also see all my “Best” lists on instructional strategies here.

Here are this week’s picks:

How to Streamline IEP Paperwork for Special and General Education Teachers is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to THE BEST RESOURCES ABOUT IEPS.

What Are the Best Fluency Learning Targets? I Think My School is Overdoing It is from Timothy Shanahan. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Reading Fluency (Including How To Measure It).

Accelerate or Remediate? You’re At The Controls. is from Middleweb. I’m adding it to THE BEST RESOURCES ABOUT ACCELERATED LEARNING.

Explicit Inquiry: A Way Out of the Inquiry vs. Explicit Instruction Wars is from Sol In The Wild (also check out If “Inquiry” Or “Direct Instruction” Is The Question, Then I Think “Inductive Learning” Is The Answer).

Obviously, our students can learn a lot of English by watching regular television series and using closed captioning.

But there are also decent online dramatic series that are specifically designed for language learning.

During my first years of teaching English Language Learners, my students and I enjoyed The Connect With English dramatic video series designed to teach English.

It eventually got to be a bit dated, and so we stopped using it. It is still available for free online. They even had accompanying workbooks, though Katie Hull and I developed our own worksheet that could be used for any of the videos (and other ones, too).

I recently learned about a New Zealand-based organization called Chasing Time English that produces multiple similar series for ELLs. They’re all available to stream for free, and they have tons of accompanying teaching materials for each one. There may be some minor issues with accents and certain vocabulary if you’re going to use in the United States, but those can be easily handled. If I still had my own classroom, I’d definitely give them a try….

You can find many episodes of another similar series, Extra English, online.

Sesame English is good for young learners.

I’ve written and shared a lot about how some boast that their wonderful and innovative strategies that work well with highly motivated upper income children can easily be applied everywhere and uplift all students.

Many of these “teacher-proof” students would do great in whatever system they’re placed in.  And, more often than not, their teachers are no better and, sometimes, even worse than the rest of us (see No Sh_T Sherlock, Another Study Finds That Just Because Your Students Do Well At Advantaged School Doesn’t Mean You’ll Have The Same Success At A Low-Income One).

Alpha School has been the latest “innovator” claiming to crack the code of teaching – with tuition as high as $75,000.

To their credit, they tried it out in Arizona, where they had to take all comers, and flopped miserably.

Dan Meyer, who does incredible work writing about AI in education, has the scoop at Does Alpha School Work for Regular Kids?

If you want to learn more about Alpha School, here are links to other articles I’ve previously shared here:

Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out is from Wired.

‘Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:’ Inside an AI-Powered Private School is from 404

Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans is from The New Yorker.

I posted photos of my classroom for many years here on the day before school began. Now that I’m retired, I can pass the torch to my grandson , Shea Rusakowicz , who begins his teaching career tomorrow!

Good luck, Shea!

Dylan Wiliam shared an incredibly important piece on Twitter explaining how Districts screw-up adopting materials, including technology:

Because they tend to be bad? https://t.co/qCKr6UZrGK

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) December 31, 2019

Why aren’t teachers using the resources companies sell to their districts? is the title of the report by Thomas Arnett. It’s from The American Enterprise Institute, which is not my favorite “think tank.”

But it nails how districts mess-up their district materials decisions (see excerpt at the top of this post).

It even pinpoints how surveys and typical teacher “input” doesn’t work, because then teachers tend to say what district staff wants to hear.

It’s definitely worth reading the entire report, including his recommendations about what districts should do, instead.

Here are some previous posts that are related to the points raised in the report, and support them:

Who Would Have Thought? Professional Development Focusing On Specific Instructional & Classroom Management Strategies Found To Be Effective

Is Any Teacher Surprised That New Study Finds Textbooks Not Key To Student Learning?

The Best Resources For Adapting Your Textbook So It Doesn’t Bore Students To Death

What Advice Would you Offer to Textbook Publishers? is from my Education Week Teacher column.

The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech

The United Nations has declared August 19th to be World Humanitarian Day:

World Humanitarian Day is a time to recognize those who face danger and adversity in order to help others. The day was designated by the General Assembly to coincide with the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq.

World Humanitarian Day is also an opportunity to celebrate the spirit that inspires humanitarian work around the globe

You might be interested in The Best Resources For World Humanitarian Day.

geralt / Pixabay

At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM:

MarcoAI is an interesting mapping tool, which you can read more about at Google Maps Mania.

Travel Animator uses AI to let you create “travel animation videos.”

Making Graphic Novels with Gemini and NotebookLM is from Control Alt Achieve.

Student writes an essay ➡️ AI rewrites the essay ➡️ “AI humanizer” rewrites the essay so it doesn’t look like AI wrote it.

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— NBC News (@nbcnews.com) January 28, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Forth Worth teacher Chanea Bond says sticking with pen and paper keeps generative artificial intelligence out of her American literature classes. n.pr/4c3cdzs

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— NPR (@npr.org) January 28, 2026 at 2:56 AM

The structure of this sentence is a dead giveaway that AI wrote it is from Fast Company.

Can Generative AI support the learning agency of students with disability? A case study of an Australian secondary school

Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/o…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 9:21 AM

Beyond the Streak: How I Use ChatGPT Voice to Break the Language Plateau is from Tom Daccord.

Why is talking to a bespoke comment bot superior to a conversation with another student? Is the quality of feedback the whole point of that exchange, or could it be that sharing our work with another unique human intelligence is meaningful regardless of the ultimately quality of the feedback?

— John Warner (@biblioracle.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 6:20 AM

Anthropic says it will watermark text generated by its AI models techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/a…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 11, 2026 at 5:47 AM

geralt / Pixabay

I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful.

Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful.  And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education.  I may also include my own comments or related links.

This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts.

Here are this week’s sentences:

Be curious rather than angry when a parent, student, or staff member does or says something you don’t like. See Leading With Inquiry, Not Judgment and “Be Curious, Not Judgmental”

As he observes to a fellow dog, “There’s no other place but here.”

As much good work as I’ve done teaching multiple generations of students in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I think the next frontier for me, and maybe for all teachers, should be policy.

The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

Data obtained by Chalkbeat from GoGuardian, an education software company that provides institutions tools to block and restrict certain webpages, shows that the rate of sites blocked in its gambling, betting and fantasy sports category has increased nearly 30% since the company started tracking in 2022, from a low of 13.48 blocks per 1,000 students to 17.4 this year. See The Best Resources For Using “Reactance” With Students To Help Them Learn About How Corporations Try To Manipulate Them

Freedom, by their definition, appears to mean that we are all more exposed to more disease and premature death. 

California’s new budget clarifies which college degrees teacher candidates can use to meet credential requirements, creates a statewide system to review teacher transcripts and increases the cost to renew a teaching credential to help pay for it. Teacher candidates pursuing a single-subject credential must have a degree in a subject related to their credential.

What would we do if we treated all our kids like they were all of our kids?”

These papers find that even students who don’t excel in high school often stand to gain from attending college.

Dennis Ross, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy who served presidents of both parties, said that “the Iranians seem to understand us better than we understand them.”

And so far, what we have around here is a bunch of gelatinous blobs.

Teacher Required To Provide Own Salary https://theonion.com/teacher-required-to-provide-own-salary/

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— The Onion (@theonion.com) July 29, 2026 at 2:00 PM

veteran teachers ARE open to new ideas. we just aren’t hearing many of them https://t.co/xkZWoptRcs

— andrea (@teachbk) July 30, 2026

Everyone waiting to see who will answer the question: “can someone take meeting notes?” https://t.co/TxJjEZx8B1

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) July 31, 2026

The immigrant union troops who defended their adopted country from slaver traitors are in fact, proof of concept of American higher ideals having nothing to do with “blood” or “heritage” or whatever cowardly euphemism is in vogue among these pathetic losers

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) August 1, 2026 at 6:35 AM

I Taught My Student the Most Important Lesson From The Odyssey. Then He Lived It. slate.com/life/2026/08…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 5:22 AM

Teachers don’t want kids to have water bottles but they also don’t want to let the kids out of the room to go drink water.

I prefer they stay in the room and also be hydrated https://t.co/noIHOWlo5d

— andrea (@teachbk) August 3, 2026

Reubens_Stock_Photos / Pixabay

I recently learned a new term used in English language teaching – “mediation activities.”

It’s used to basically describe any activity where students have to explain something to someone else.

Certainly, teaching classmates (see The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates — Help Me Find More ) and jigsaws(see THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE JIGSAW INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGY  ) fit that bill, but there are lots of other activities that would, also.  It’s a very interesting – to me, at least – way of looking at lessons.  It’s basically challenging students to “make meaning” for someone else.  It could even be just rephrasing or summarizing for someone else.

Here are some resources to learn more about it:

Mediation: The What, Why & How Explained is from Emily Bryson.

Mediation in the ELT Classroom is from HLT Magazine.

Mediation skills in the English language classroom is from Cambridge.

Three ways to start encouraging mediation skills with your learners is from Cambridge.

MEDIATION: What it is, how to teach it and how to assess it. is also from Cambridge.

Mediating a Text: A Practical Guide to Task Creation is from MacMillan.

How To Help Your English Learners Develop Mediation Skills is from Oxford.

Ten years ago I began this regular feature where I share a few posts and resources from around the Web related to ESL/EFL or to language in general that have caught my attention.

You might also be interested in all my Best lists on teaching ELLs.

Also, check out A Collection Of My Best Resources On Teaching English Language Learners.

In addition, look for our latest book on teaching ELLs, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox 2.0.

Here are this week’s choices:

Finish the picture is a nice lesson plan from On The Same Page ELT.

Voices of Resistance: Multilingual Identity Formation Through Translanguaging in Dual Language Bilingual Education is a new study.

Six Simple Logic Puzzles for English Class is from Six Things.

‘My grandmother never talked to me again’ is from The Future is Bilingual. I’m adding it to The Best Resources Explaining Why We Need To Support The Home Language Of ELLs,

✨✨New lesson plan on the blog A2!!! Are you an Optimist or a Pessimist? Here my Students learn to use ‘will’ for predictions. Fun is guaranteed! 😂​😂​😂​https://t.co/0zwglqHkxb via @SerenasBlog1

— Serena’s Blog (@SerenasBlog1) January 13, 2026

Songs and Movements Towards Enriching English Vocabulary of Second Language Learners is a new study. I’m adding it to The Best Music Websites For Learning English.

Helping every learner access the world: reading support for EAL students through adaptive teaching is from The GA Blog.

If Conditionals Were People: Humanising Grammar Through Creativity Part 1

INTEGRATING PODCASTS TO IMPROVE WRITING SKILLS OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN ELT CLASSROOM is actually a study of the use of dictogloss. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning How To Use The Dictogloss Strategy With English Language Learners.

Bruno Mars ESL Lesson (B2): a 2026 Hit Inspired Narrative Simulation is from Song Activity Factory.

ELL students can watch this video and then talk/write about what they saw:

Mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature.

You can see all my “Best” lists related to education research here.

Here are some new useful studies (and related resources):

“Sleep: Educational Impact and Habit Formation”

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/…

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— John Holbein (@johnholbein1.bsky.social) January 28, 2026 at 11:48 AM

Math Pathways Evidence Hub is from The Annenberg Institute.

Does something crack in secondary school? A large meta-analysis on student engagement is from Experience To Meaning. I’m adding it to The Best Posts & Articles On Student Engagement.

Research Bite #53: A Meta-analytic Review of the Effectiveness of Spacing and Retrieval Practice for Mathematics Learning is from Tips For Teachers.

The Nation’s Achievement Inequality Report Card: An Assessment of Test Score and Equality Trends in Traditional Public, Charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense Schools

I wonder how this idea could be applied to learning in school https://t.co/N3KHYN5tQH

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) February 4, 2026