Month: November 2023

Much attention in the post-pandemic era has been on what students have lost – days of school, psychological health, knowledge and skills. But now we have evidence that they may also have gained something: schools that address more of their needs. A majority of public schools have begun providing services that are far afield from traditional academics, including health care, housing assistance, childcare and food aid.
In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60% said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45% a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids.
“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at G..

Enunciated syllables, slow speech and spelling — these are the adjustments some students find themselves making as they introduce themselves to their teachers each school year. For these students, whose names might be misspelled in emails or autocorrected in text messages, this annual ritual carries significance. It often determines what they will be called for the entire school year. “This is a matter children feel strongly about, yet adults aren’t always as attentive to,” said elementary school teacher Jennifer Orr. According to a 2011 study, daily mispronunciations of names are microaggressions that can significantly affect students’ self-perception and sense of belonging.
Names are one of the topics covered in We’re Gonna Keep on Talking, which Orr co-authored with Philadelphia educator Matthew R. Kay. The book guides educators through how to foster meaningful conversations about race with elementary school students. The names unit, which Orr has done about five times over the las..

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.
Recently there has been a movement on social media and the parenting community more broadly to practice “gentle parenting.” The exact definition of gentle parenting is not completely clear because it is not a term that has been studied in the research or used by psychologists in clinical practice. The term gentle parenting is credited to British author, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who wrote several books on the topic. Gentle parenting has since become a buzzword and been co-opted by countless parenting influencers on social media.
Reassuringly though, most conceptualizations of gentle parenting seem to be based on principles that nearly every child psychologist or expert in child development would endorse such as respecting the child, taking the child’s perspective into account, empathizing with and validating your child and building the parent-child bond thr..