Curriculum & Instruction

If you want to know what motivates students—and teachers and administrators, for that matter—Russell Quaglia says you have to go to the source. Quaglia has spent years collecting information about “school voice”—that is, what these three groups think about their schools. The latest incarnation of this work is the Student Voice Survey. With different versions […]

The issue of fake news drew national attention during the 2016 presidential campaign, when fabricated stories were widely accepted as genuine. According to recent research, the problem extends to K12 classrooms, where students have trouble judging the credibility of online information. A national assessment of 203 middle school students by Stanford History Education Group at […]

On the first Friday of every school year, the new kindergartners of Utah’s Canyons School District look ahead to the future—far ahead. To mark Kindergarten College-Ready Day, the children make construction-paper mortar boards and march in mock graduation ceremonies, applauded by high school and college athletes and cheerleaders. Teachers come to school wearing T-shirts and […]

Andrew Smith, chief strategy officer in North Carolina’s Rowan-Salisbury School System, is leading a digital-first initiative that three years ago aimed to give an iPad or a MacBook Air to all students—and their teachers—from grades 3 through 12. Rowan-Salisbury became 1-to-1 by the 2014-15 school year. Three years into a digital-first initiative, Andrew Smith, chief strategy […]

Albemarle County, Virginia—A snake bit Pam Moran in front of her class on her first day of teaching 40 years ago. Moran, now a superintendent in Virginia, had no one to blame but herself on that fateful day in 1975. Thinking it would be an unconventional way to introduce herself, Moran had brought a garter […]

Principal DeMarcos Holland, of New Manchester High School in the Douglas County School System in Georgia, has replaced traditional class tardy bells with music, including compositions created by students and teachers. The friendlier sounds have lowered the average number of tardies from between 50 and 60 per day to less than 10. Holland has also introduced […]