in Teachers
As a teacher watched a video of a classroom discussion she recorded, she kept noticing places where discussion would be on the verge of beginning, only to see it die almost immediately. The students were prepared, and they were often asking the types of questions teachers want them to ask–so why did the discussion keep faltering? She had to start looking at their pedagogy. What she discovered was that they didn’t know how to build…
Read More »Many migrants, especially unaccompanied youth, face uncertain paths in detention and after their release in local communities. Schools are often the first and sometimes the only places they can turn for resources. Research shows that everyday educators have been left to deal with the aftermath of recent political charades, as well as a broken immigrant system, racialized immigration surveillance, deplorable detention facility conditions, and lack of access to educational and social resources for young people.…
Read More »Learning transfer is the practice of applying knowledge or meaning from a familiar context to an unfamiliar context. This movement requires re-contextualizing what students know, which first requires that they strip ‘what they know’ of all context, consider it in isolation, then adapt it to work elsewhere. This is a cognitively demanding practice. Of course, this doesn’t happen by admonishing students to transfer their knowledge, but rather is the result of transfer-by-design. This entails continuously…
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Instructors and students often have different ideas about what grades are supposed to measure. Should they be about how much students have learned? How much work they have completed? How well they have mastered the subject? Arguably, they measure none of these well. Grades can perpetuate bias, inequalities, and injustice; reduce student motivation and willingness to challenge themselves; and add enormous administrative burdens. No wonder many students and faculty dislike grades. Collaborative grading could be…
Read More »Schools nationwide are cutting bus service to account for a widespread bus driver shortage—and students are paying the price by missing school more often. Those are the main takeaways from a report published this month from HopSkipDrive, a private school transportation provider. The report includes results from a nationally representative survey of school and district leaders, transportation directors, counselors, and other employees. More than two-thirds of survey respondents said they see a link between driver…
Read More »in Art, ELA, Elementary School, Mathematics, Organization, Reading, Science, Teachers
From field trips and retreats to special assemblies and holiday celebrations, children should enjoy an enriching classroom experience, both during the school day and after school. These memorable events and enrichment programs make learning fun and build a sense of community among students. Here are twenty ideas for elementary school clubs, ranging from standard to out of the box. 1. Culture club. This is a multicultural association for students. At meetings, members can share their…
Read More »New research from Boston University’s Wheelock Education Policy Center finds that teacher diversity increased in Massachusetts during the COVID-19 pandemic. The racial and ethnic diversity of teachers hired for the 2020-2021 Massachusetts school year increased. This was particularly true in schools serving the state’s highest concentrations of Black and Latinx students, where roughly 41% of newly hired teachers were people of color. These increases combined with lower turnover among Black and Latinx teachers resulted in…
Read More »Setting up centers in preschool and kindergarten classrooms can be a pretty daunting task, especially if it’s your first time doing so. Where do you start? Centers are activities located in specific areas around the classroom, and often, each specific area is also referred to as a center. Children typically work in small groups during center time, and they can also work independently. Centers can be done at one time during the school day, with…
Read More »A national group that seeks to curb chronic absenteeism is sounding an alarm after finding that the number of chronically absent students continued to surge even as pandemic closings abated. The organization, Attendance Works, believes that the number of students missing at least 18 days of school a year doubled to 16 million in 2021-22 from 8 million students before the pandemic. If correct, this means that one out of every three public school children…
Read More »in Study Tips, Teachers
It’s no surprise that loud, unwanted sounds can be disruptive and even damaging to ears. However, even background noise like the air conditioning running, the refrigerator humming and delivery vans idling outside can be cause for concern. According to Nina Kraus, a neurobiology professor at Northwestern University who studies sound, ongoing noises that people claim to “tune out” are unlikely to harm ears, but they can still have a profound effect on the brain. Repeated…
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