The 3,000 students in rural Maine’s Regional School Unit 19 begin compiling electronic portfolios of their schoolwork in pre-K, when the district issues every child a Google account. In the elementary years, teachers snap and upload digital photos of handwritten work. In the upper grades, students accustomed to electronically documenting their school lives habitually upload […]
From Newark to Los Angeles, districts building affordable homes for teachers hope to better retain and recruit staff as local housing costs rise and salaries remain stagnant. Many new housing developments are in California: The city of San Francisco announced plans in October to build 100 units for the city’s educators. It may also offer […]
When it comes to racism in our public schools, many people pretend it doesn’t exist, says Pamela Lewis. In her new book, Teaching While Black, Lewis says a misplaced focus on test scores hides the true causes of underperforming inner-city schools: poverty and race. When it comes to racism in our public schools, many people […]
In Baldwin Community Schools, students had been returning from summer break having lost more than six weeks of learning—two weeks more than is typical. The district is located in the lowest-income county in rural Michigan, where 94 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Superintendent Stiles Simmons resolved the learning loss issue in […]
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo plans to bring computer science courses to every school in the state by the end of 2017. To ease concerns over a lack of teachers trained to teach the subject, the state has formed the Computer Science for Rhode Island (CS4RI) initiative to supply the needed PD. That professional development […]
Children across the nation learned downward dog, the tree and the frog, among many other yoga positions and movements this past spring. The first Kids’ Yoga Day rolled out at 11 a.m., on April 8 with more than 25,000 children in 46 states and 21 countries. Teresa Ann Powers, a yoga instructor and author of […]
While detention remains a staple of student discipline across the country, many school leaders are looking at ways to modify the practice, or even replace it, with approaches that may be more effective in actually reducing bad behavior. Classic detention, where bored students sit silently and unproductively in classrooms after school, has limited value as […]
After a shake-up in Oklahoma City Public Schools that resulted with Superintendent Rob Neu and the district “parting ways” Aurora Lora has taken over as superintendent. Lora, a former fourth-grade teacher in Houston and a district administrator in Portland, Seattle and Dallas, had been a finalist for the job in 2014. Neu subsequently hired her […]
Blended learning can support a more personalized approach to education. You’ve no doubt heard of the teaching approach in which students spend part of the day learning online at their own pace and part of the day receiving instruction from a classroom teacher. But there are still a number of misconceptions about what blended learning […]
In what appears to be an average classroom, students from Pullman School District 267 in Washington wear devices that measure their pulse, eye movements and brain waves as a teacher gives a lesson. The classroom is part of the Neurocognitive Science Lab at Washington State University, which opened this year. The lab, funded by the […]
