Education
Observed each October, during National Disability Employment Awareness Month, or “NDEAM,” we celebrate the value and talent workers with disabilities add to America’s workplaces and economy. NDEAM’s purpose is to confirm our commitment to ensuring disabled workers have access to good jobs, every month of every year. Let’s hear from an educator on how we can bring disability history and disability employment awareness into the classroom. A few years ago, curriculum specialist Richard Cairn showed…
Read More »
A SMART goal is a framework for defining objectives, where each goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Follow this method to establish clear, attainable goals that hold you accountable to a deadline. SMART goals are useful in all professional sectors and industries, as well as in your personal life and in education. Using this framework will help ensure that you are working toward clearly defined goals that you can execute by a…
Read More »
Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID, but the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation. One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic…
Read More »
It’s no secret that when schools make a concerted effort to foster healthy, strong relationships with families, students benefit in a number of ways. Studies suggest that parental involvement and communication can lead to academic gains for students: higher grades and test scores, improved social skills and time on task, better attendance and participation, and decreased behavioral problems in the classroom. But parent-teacher communication can be challenging, say teachers. In 2006, 50 percent of participants…
Read More »
It is never too early to start practicing good money habits–in fact, the earlier teenagers are exposed to financial education, the better the chance they will become financially savvy. This is an important life lesson in general, but especially if college is on the horizon for your teenager. Becoming a college student is probably one of the most exciting and immediate milestones for high school students; teenagers feel a sense of freedom, and it’s often…
Read More »
Wherever we are, we’d all like to think our children’s classrooms and schools are intellectually active places, but what does that actually mean? What makes an effective learning environment? Please let us know your ideas in the comments and read on for ours. The students ask the questions—good questions The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps under-studied and under-appreciated), but suffice to say that if a learner enters any learning activity with little…
Read More »
What are the latest emerging and popular trends and teaching ideas in education? As trends tend to do, they change by the year. Consider how quiet iPads in the classroom have been recently, especially considering three years ago they were going to replace teachers and were compared to magic. While mobile devices like the iPad can indeed parallel a kind of magic in the learning process, it obviously has to fit into a progressive and…
Read More »
We usually think of technology as a progressive thing in education, but any technology dates itself immediately through its form. Electricity, the wheel, paper, the printing press, metalworking, mass transportation, masonry, and more are all forms of technology. Technology isn’t a ‘leading edge’ but a tool of human practice. On a day-to-day basis, human processes are based on prevailing local technology. That is, we usually use what’s available to us to express our collective humanity…
Read More »
Deciding what’s “trending” is an important part of digital publishing and social media interaction. Facebook articles, Google News, Apple News, trending hashtags on twitter, and even our own websites all depend heavily on statistics. It’s easy to have a problem with this concept philosophically–namely, the most popular isn’t always the most effective or the best. So what are the most popular educational trends? Here are 5 of the most common educational trends from the past…
Read More »