School leaders everywhere have experienced parent, staff and student anxiety about school safety following the tragic attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. While these emotionally charged climates are understandable, making knee-jerk decisions with a “do something, do anything, do it now” mantra can lead to high-risk, high-liability actions that administrators and […]
Math instruction continues to move further into digital territory, but many lessons still depend on hands-on activities and nondigital materials, such as textbooks. Schools choose computer-based and online curricula because they can provide more engaging ways for students to learn—from playing games and watching instructional videos to creating graphs and drawing shapes digitally. These programs […]
How important was collaboration when designing the FirstView¬Á suite of products? Extremely. When we began to develop FirstView, we conducted nationwide focus groups asking both parents and administrators for their transportation pain points. We received meaningful feedback. The study enabled a thorough and open dialog. Administrators wanted bus tracking and easy communication. Parents gave us […]
How can district administrators make more efficient, effective and strategic decisions? There is data available to support many of the decisions that school administrators make every day. Often though, it takes time to manually gather and model that data. If a project uses 80 percent of its timeline to gather and model data, that leaves […]
Colleges blame high schools. High schools blame middle schools. Middle schools blame elementaries—and everyone tends to blame funding, poverty, bad parenting and other factors for low student achievement. A new movement that promises closer cooperation between higher ed and K12 aims to end this legacy of passing the buck. Educators from New York City to […]
Timothy Collier has been teaching high school mathematics for more than 30 years, most of them at McAlester High School in southeast Oklahoma, where he is the department chair. State budget cuts have affected McAlester High School and the district’s eight other schools, especially in the area of professional development for teachers, who were facing […]
eMPower AssessmentsÁ‘¢ by Measured Progress is a college and career readiness assessment program for grades 3 through 8. It is based on current research about what students need to know and be able to do for success beyond high school. With three assessment opportunities each year, eMPower provides a cohesive system of interim assessments to […]