Schools can streamline administrative processes and enhance staff collaboration with workplace productivity solutions that have been made popular by some of the world’s largest and most-respected companies. Enterprise-grade technologies to digitize processes as foundational as human resources paperwork, for example, can provide schools some of the same kind of efficiency and data-access gains that businesses have experienced through digital transformation.
Research shows that family engagement is vital to improving student outcomes, so here are six ways educators can strengthen the school-to-family connection by helping caregivers emphasize reading fluency — with actionable ideas for families to help their students develop stronger fluency skills at home.
- By Lauren Bardwell
- 03/25/22
Online learning can be an important tool for advancing student equity by bringing instructional opportunities to students that didn’t exist for them before. However, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, online instruction can sometimes widen equity gaps if the circumstances aren’t favorable. For online learning to support student equity, here are five critical elements that must be in place.
The opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills and abilities by any means available during the pandemic shattered the one-size-fits-all model of bubble sheets, rote memorization, and timed exams. Already the backlash to No Child Left Behind had softened the terrain, but figuratively tearing down the classroom walls tossed many educators and students into the deep-end of these educational cousins which are soon to be the hallmarks of 21st century learning.
Educators know that social-emotional learning, also known as SEL, is an important and crucial student need, but managing this in the classroom can be difficult. After all, there’s so much on educators’ plates and SEL is one more thing weighing on educators’ minds.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on equity disparities in K–12 education, with new attention on how factors such as internet access, home environments, and family dynamics can impact student success. As schools continue responding to pandemic disruptions, timely and comprehensive data in one spot remains critical to educators’ abilities to make informed decisions and create targeted interventions.
A Bilingual Director of Curriculum in a district with hundreds of young students learning English during the pandemic shares how an online adaptive, blended learning literacy program made a world of difference in outcomes among second-graders transitioning to using English fully in their classes.
- By Maria Arambula-Ruiz
- 03/02/22
An administrator at North Clackamas School District in Oregon whose students speak more than 60 different languages describes the ways the district benefitted from adopting a unified school-home communications platform.
- By Shelly Reggiani
- 02/11/22
Ensuring equitable access for all students to STEAM learning and career preparation is everyone's job: At home, parents should encourage their children to participate in what they like, disregarding what marketing executives decided was “appropriate” for girls or boys; and at school, teachers must encourage both girls and boys in their formative processes, wherever that might lead them. Technology (or any career) has no gender; it should be open to everyone who takes an interest in it.
- By Claudia Marroquin
- 02/10/22
What teachers most need is not another app, it’s student goal setting—the process of working with students to set a short-term learning goal, track progress toward that goal, and celebrate success. Senior education researcher and author Chase Nordengren lays out the five steps to start revolutionizing student learning with student goal setting in a workshop-style classroom.
- By Chase Nordengren
- 02/02/22