Day: March 7, 2023

School counselor Meredith Draughn starts every day by greeting the students who fill her campus hallways, cup of coffee in hand. There are about 350 of them, and she knows all their names.
“Kids want to feel known and want to feel loved. And greeting them by name is one way we can do that…Research shows that that helps us build a positive culture and a welcoming culture.”
Draughn works at B. Everett Jordan Elementary School in the rural town of Graham, N.C., and she was recently named 2023’s School Counselor of the Year by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). The selection committee praised Draughn’s data-driven approach and passion for her students.
The award comes at a pivotal time for Draughn: in the middle of the most “normal” school year since the pandemic began. Masking is optional in most schools; quarantine regulations have been loosened; and in May, the Biden administration plans to declare an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But children are still..

Where have all the bookworms gone? Recreational reading has been shown to reduce stress and improve working memory, but fewer children are reading for fun than ever before. In recent surveys by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 16% of 9-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun, compared to 11% in 2012 and 9% in 1984. Among 13-year-olds, that number was 29% in 2020, compared with 22% in 2012 and 8% in 1984.
Authors Grace Lin and Kate Messner believe books give readers the ability to experience new worlds and empathize with others. Together they wrote “Once Upon A Book,” a children’s picture book where the main character Alice is swept away on an adventure through the magic of reading.
“There is a perfect book for everyone,” said Lin. “You just have to find it.” However, there is an art to matching kids with the right book. For parents and teachers who want children to cultivate a love of reading, Messner and Lin provided tips on how to help kids find wonder..

Taken from “One Green Thing” by Heather White. Copyright © 2022 by Heather White. Used by permission of Harper Horizon, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.
“Mom and Dad, we are running out of time. I can’t vote. You can’t wait for us to clean up your mess and fix it. We need you to act now,” my then fourteen-year-old daughter Cady pleaded.
It was September 2019. We were talking to the girls about the upcoming climate strike and student walkout inspired by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The weather report called for heavy rain, so I offered to pick up Cady and drive her to the protest site after she left the high school. This parental gesture made perfect sense to me since she had to carry her trumpet and her freshman backpack, which weighed a ton. Besides, the protest starting point was a mile away.
Cady rolled her eyes and patiently explained to me, her environmental lawyer mother, that having a parent drive her to a climate walkout defeated its purpose. She said she w..

U.S. teens spend more than eight hours a day on screens, and there’s growing concern over how social media may affect their mental health.
Now, a new study, published Thursday by the American Psychological Association, validates what some parents have experienced when their teenagers cut back: They seem to feel better about themselves. I’ve seen this in my own kids when they return from summer camp, where phones are not allowed. They seem more at ease and less moody.
Social media can feel like a comparison trap, says study author Helen Thai, a doctoral student in psychology at McGill University. Her research found that limiting screen time to about one hour a day helped anxious teens and young adults feel better about their body image and their appearance.
Her research arose from her own personal experiences.
“What I noticed when I was engaging in social media was that I couldn’t help but compare myself,” Thai says. Scrolling through posts from celebrities and influencers, as well ..

Ever since the pandemic shut down schools almost three years ago, I’ve been writing about tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. I often get questions about research on tutoring. How effective is tutoring? How many schools are doing it? How is it going so far? In this column, I’m recapping the evidence for tutoring and what we know now about pandemic tutoring. For those who want to learn more, there are links to sources throughout and at the end, a list of Hechinger Report stories on tutoring.
Well before the pandemic, researchers were zeroing in on tutoring as a way to help children who were significantly behind grade level. Remedial classes had generally been a failure, and researchers often saw disappointing results from after-school and summer school programs because students didn’t show up or didn’t want to go to school during vacation.
But evidence for tutoring has been building for more than 30 years, as tutoring organizations designed reading..