EMPOWER500 Summer SYMPOSIUM

A helping hand for the busy English teacher

If you are a teacher, you likely spend hours a  week searching for  materials to make your lessons engaging. Those hours can really add up.  Thousands of websites out there offer excellent teaching resources for middle  and high school English teachers but you also have to weed through a lot of  repetition and junk. That is time wasted in an already packed schedule.  

Stop searching. 

This site picks through the best of what's out  there and houses tons of resources and lessons, all FREE. We  also create materials designed to engage students and provide efficiency for  teachers. In  addition, we send The Monday  Morning Connection Newsletter  which delivers relevant and time-saving  lessons and rresources for middle and high school English teachers. 

The truly unique aspect of this organization is the Premium  Membership. If you find you just never have enough hours in the  day, then Premium Membership is for you. As former high school English teachers,  our main goals are to provide relevant and practical material while saving you  time.  

Premium Membership provides teachers with an online personal assistant to do all those things that suck  the time away from teaching. Need a PowerPoint made? Simply send in a request.  Want to find some new materials for a novel you are teaching? Just let us  know. 

Don't spend time searching for materials--not even on this site--just tell us your needs. 

We also provide workshops, ongoing professional  development, personalized assistance and student programs that engage our most  reluctant learners. Click  here to read more about the programs we offer. 

Each summer we host an annual GET INSPIRED  SUMMER SYMPOSIUM. A week of workshops,  presentations, and collaboration at little cost  to teachers. This year our theme is EMPOWER 500. This truly unique event will be unlike any other professional development you have attended. We will poll our 500 teachers first, then work to find what they need/want. We also support them AFTER the conference. You don't want to miss these amazing opportunities. 

The English Teacher's Friend is here to help so you can get back to what's important--teaching.

Free Lessons

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Our Mission

The English Teacher’s Friend is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide individualized support to secondary English teachers, improve the  literacy of their students through innovative programs, and provide cost-effective solutions to teachers, schools, and districts by collaborating with other educationally-focused organizations.

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Newest Additions

Symposium Information - JOIN US FOR EMPOWER 500
FCAT 2.0 Reading Preparation

From the BLOG:
Five Fcat 2.0 Tips

These are suggestions from the newsletter I sent this morning for teaching FCAT 2.0. These are important
issues that I think are most often neglected in our schools when teaching standardized tests.

1. Do not use Content Focus Reports
as evidence of strengths and weaknesses. Content Focus Reports are those reports that come out after the test. They break down the raw number of questions in each strand and how many the student got right.  This has been one of the biggest misuses of data from student testing. Many schools require teachers to evaluate that information for their individual students and then create a remedial plan based off it. Why is
this not appropriate? Because the number of questions and the cognitive complexity levels in each category vary year to year. This means a student might have scored very well in the vocabulary section (8 out of 9 correct), but these might have been all low and moderate complexity questions. Likewise, you might
assume they scored poorly in the literary analysis category since they received 4 out of 8 but all the questions might have been high level cognitive complexity questions in which case they will have done pretty decent.

The Content Focus information from the FLDOE website even states “Content Focus Reports should not be used to make decisions about instruction at the individual student level. Some reporting categories have too few test items to report reliable or meaningful scores at the student level. While well-intended, providing remedial instruction in a specific reporting category may not be justified and may be an inefficient use of instructional time. Content focus data should not be used as sole indicators to determine
remedial needs of students.”
...read more...

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