Leading Schools

One of the most glaring findings from the study was that at the district level people would say 'We are doing PBIS; we are doing SEL'... " said Pete Talbot, the managing director of K-12 research at EAB. "The question is, 'What is the consistency with which it's being implemented from school to school within a district, and within the school? What's the degree of fidelity down to the classroom level?'.... I think that's one of the biggest areas for improvement for districts. It's not enough to simply do a one-time training or allow schools to go their own way."

Early reading instruction in the United States focuses heavily on teaching students phonics. These results seem to suggest that students may have a more difficult time distinguishing phonemes and following speech or instructions as classroom noise rises, and highlights the importance of quiet classrooms while children are learning to recognize language, said Marc Vander Ghinst, the lead author and a researcher at a developmental neuroscience center at the Free University of Brussels, in Belgium. 

"The more teachers take time to do a correct pronunciation, the better the student understands," he said. "Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that this also brings a better speech representation in the brain. My advice would be: Take the time to do a correct pronunciation, and try to do it in a calm atmosphere."

How often do students come to you and exclaim, "But I studied for hours!" How can we help students improve their study habits? Before you give them strategies, there's one thing you have to do first: have a conversation. Here are our three must-ask questions to get started.

About a third of high school students took courses for college credit, according to a nationally representative study from the U.S. Department of Education. The new dual-enrollment data are based on a 2009 study of more than 23,000 ninth graders, whom the department surveyed again in following years.
The study found that students whose parents had higher levels of education were more likely to take courses for college credit while they were in high school. For example, 42 percent of high school students whose parents held at least a bachelor's degree took college courses, compared to 26 percent whose parents did not hold a high school credential. In addition, the study found that a lower percentage of Latino high school students (30 percent) and black students (27 percent) took dual-enrollment courses than did white or Asian American students (both 38 percent).

Here’s a great video of Alonte Johnson, some time English Teacher and full time Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at Uncommon’s Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Middle Academy, that shows a high level model of one solution– we call it a “Responsive Turn and Talk” because the Turn and Talk is a response to a low number of hands.

Yesterday was one of the most intellectually intense days I’ve had in some time, and I came to realize some important things about Check for Understanding.

I’m going to try to summarize some of them here.

1) Check for Understanding is quite possibly the single most important group of techniques in terms of building relationships with students–I had never fully made that connection before and I suspect many other teachers hadn’t either.

I realized this over the course of a meeting with our TLAC Fellows in which we set out to discuss and study building relationships in the classroom- something my team and I are interested in studying because we think it’s an important topic and because we think it’s an oft-misunderstood or misapplied topic.

The first thing we realized was that many teachers focused their relationship building efforts on what happens outside of the core teaching–greeting students in the hallway and asking them about their interests.

Here’s a great video of Alonte Johnson, some time English Teacher and full time Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at Uncommon’s Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Middle Academy, that shows a high level model of one solution– we call it a “Responsive Turn and Talk” because the Turn and Talk is a response to a low number of hands.

It’s up to people who hold positions of privilege to be active allies to those with less access, and to take responsibility for making changes that will help others be successful. Active allies utilize their credibility to create a more inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive, and find ways to make their privilege work for others.

And wielding privilege as an ally doesn’t have to be hard. I’ve seen allies at all levels take action with simple, everyday efforts that made a difference—often a big one!

The researchers found that as violent crime increased in areas where students walked or waited for a bus, their attendance dropped. A doubling of the incidents of violent crime was associated with 6 percent higher student absenteeism—roughly an additional day missed for each student per year. Julia Burdick-Will, lead author of the study, noted that because the number of individual crimes is relatively low at any given bus stop, it's not that hard for students to face a sudden doubling of violent incidents during the school year. 

Research shows that instructional leadership has a positive impact on student learning. For example, in Hattie's synthesis of meta-analysis (2009. 2012), which includes over 420 studies on school leadership, he found that instructional leadership was the most impactful way to lead a school (as opposed to transformational leadership, management, etc.) because it helps put a focus on learning. Hattie is far from the only researcher who has come to this finding, which is the direct result of his ability to synthesize over 420 studies on leadership. 

Massachusetts students who took state exams online in 2015 scored significantly worse than their peers who took the same exams on paper, according to a new study by the American Institutes for Research.

The so-called "mode effect" was particularly pronounced in English/language arts, where the discrepancy amounted to nearly a full year of learning, AIR found. Lower-performing students, special education students, and English language learners suffered particularly sharp penalties when they took the ELA exams online.

In both ELA and math, however, the negative effects of taking the exams online diminished considerably during the second year of testing.

You’ve probably seen some version of this aphorism if you work in education:   They Don’t Care How Much You Know Until They Know How Much You Care   It’s s often given a sort of hallowed stature-it’s a truism & should shape our every decision in the classroom.   Maybe that’s why it’s attribute

Lack of confidence in our ability to understand math can affect both students and teachers. Jerry Burkhart looks at some of the reasons why and what we can do.

When math teachers talk about what they do for a living, the reply is often something like “Oh, I was never very good at math.” In fact, this lack of confidence in math ability seems so pervasive as to be more cultural than personal.

As an experiment, try typing “I used to be good…” into a search engine. “I used to be good at math” will probably show up high (maybe even first) on the list of auto-completions! It appears that even people who start out feeling confident in math often lose this confidence over time.