Month: August 2023

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In 2018, following the reveal of a new dress code, students enthusiastically showed up to Alice Deal Middle School in spaghetti straps, flip flops and short hemlines. “It was just on parade,” said Principal Diedre Neal about students’ attire. With time, the strappy, short outfits leveled off. Neal said that while adolescents revel in novelty, their desire to be comfortable won out in the end: “They ran out of completely outrageous things. The completely outrageous things are also not comfortable or feasible.”
The decision to reevaluate the dress code arose from the realization that the existing policies were no longer aligned with the needs of the students at Alice Deal, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. Prior to the change, students were pulled out of class if their outfits violated the school dress code. “They had their work. They were engaging. They were learning,” said Neal. “And we took them away from their learning to have a conversat..

Social-emotional learning – aimed at fostering a wide assortment of soft skills from empathy and listening to anger management and goal-setting – has been one of the hottest trends in education over the past decade, and more recently, a new flashpoint in the culture wars. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group, advises parents to oppose it, while advocates on the left say it should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.
Alongside the politics, there’s a genuine debate over whether these programs – often abbreviated as SEL and sold to thousands of schools around the country – actually help students.
For years, advocates have claimed that research evidence supports social-emotional learning, citing hundreds of studies that find SEL instruction improves both academic achievement and student well-being. One of the most influential papers is a 2011 meta-analysis that reviewed more than 200 studies on SEL programs in schools and concluded that academic performanc..

From Welcome to Reading Workshop by Lynne Dorfman and Brenda Krupp ©2023. Stenhouse Publishers, reproduced with permission of Stenhouse Publishers.
On a warm August evening, Brenda sits with her computer and a handful of envelopes. She eagerly opens the first envelope and begins to read. “Thank you for asking about our daughter Claire. . .” the letter begins. Each year Brenda sends a small survey along with her welcome-back-to-school letter to the parents, caregivers, or guardians of her incoming students. She asks them to introduce their precious children to her by describing them and answering some simple questions. What are your child’s interests? Likes and dislikes?
Strengths and needs? What are your hopes and dreams for your child this year? And what does your child like to read? Brenda reads each letter and questionnaire, taking notes, in preparation for meeting each student. These little tidbits of information will help Brenda find books for her students on day one. Reading ea..

One of the great debates in education spans more than two millennia.
Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)
Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. ..

Educators, particularly English Language Arts teachers and librarians, play a critical role in cultivating students’ love for reading. Studies have shown that teachers who are passionate readers bring valuable literacy practices into the classroom. However, in their efforts to improve students’ reading abilities, it is important not to overlook the reading habits and needs of educators themselves. Even though most teachers understand the importance of reading for fun, a study looking at teachers’ reading practices found that nearly half of teachers do not read for pleasure regularly.
“You have to do things after work to pour into your spirit, and reading may not be at the top of that list,” said literacy educator Lois Marshall Barker, who has over 14 years of experience as a classroom teacher, instructional coach and professional development and curriculum specialist. Despite a recent RAND survey indicating that teachers’ stress levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels, 23% of tea..

This opinion column about teaching climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Sometime this fall, in a classroom in New York City, second graders will use pipe cleaners and Post-it notes to build a model of a tree that could cool a city street. They’ll shine a lamp on their mini trees to see what shade patterns they cast. Meanwhile, in Seattle, kindergartners might take a “wondering walk” outside and come up with questions about the worms that show up on the sidewalk after it rains.
This summer, teachers around the country are planning these lessons and more, in professional development programs designed to answer a pressing need: preparing teachers to teach about the climate crisis and empower students to act.
“I believe that the climate movement is the most interesting movement in education,” said Oren Pizmony-Levy, associate professor of ..

Middle school English teacher Brett Vogelsinger wasn’t always attuned to the needs of introverts. As an extrovert himself, he found it easy to raise his hand and be vocal in school. So when he became a teacher, he believed those were the hallmarks of a good student.
“I would even see a student in an honors class who wasn’t super participatory, and I’d think to myself, ‘What are they doing in an honors class?’ They don’t seem that into English class,” he said. “I don’t really like that I thought that, but I did.”
Teacher Brett Vogelsinger reads a passage from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)Vogelsinger has taught at Central Bucks School District – a large, suburban district outside Philadelphia – for 20 years. In that time, the concepts of introversion and extroversion have become more widely known. As author Susan Cain explained in a viral Ted Talk in 2012, “extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their..