Welcome to Edgy Tips, a side project of the Cult of Petticogee Podcast where I share one quick

tidbit of educational research, teaching ideas, classroom management strategies, or sometimes

just a quick story. This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host. This Edgy Tip is supported

by Reading Progress in Teams, a free tool by Microsoft designed to improve reading fluency.

Students record themselves reading aloud at school or at home and submit it for teacher

review. With AI-powered estimations of student errors, easy data collection, and dashboards

to track student growth, this free tool is designed to give educators more time to do what they do

best. Teach. With Reading Progress, educators can do fluency checks more often to better adapt to

students' needs. Created for diverse classrooms, including emerging readers, non-native readers,

and those with learning disabilities, Reading Progress is supported in over 37 languages.

Try Reading Progress on Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, or Android. To learn more about Reading Progress,

go to aka.ms-microsoftreading. That's aka.ms-microsoftreading. Today's Edgy Tip is distract the distractor.

This is a subtle little teaching move you can use to stop off-task behavior in a class session

and get things back on track without drama. The strategy is this. When a student is exhibiting

some distracting behavior, instead of calling them out or publicly disciplining them, just ask

them a lesson-based question that you know they'll be able to answer. This stops their behavior

and refocuses them without anyone missing a beat. Here's an example. Suppose your class is in

the middle of a philosophical chair's discussion. That's where half the class takes one side of a

debatable question and the other half takes the other side, and each side sends one representative

at a time to speak on their behalf. Say they're debating, raising the minimum wage, and each side

has three articles they're using to support their positions. Although the discussion has been

going well, there are two girls on the pro side who are clearly not talking about minimum wage.

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