Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
Limited Time To Learn: How We Coach Busy Teachers
Four Lessons I learned from Reading Recovery
Increasing workplace flexibility means that schools can’t become more rigid
Hacking Assessment to Go Gradeless with Starr Stackstein
I’ve been an admirer of Starr Sackstein and her work for a long time. She’s been a beacon for years on moving away from grading and moving toward a focus on self-directed learning. She has made real movements in pedagogy and ownership of learning through her passion, practical advice, and the way she has grown a supportive educator community. I asked her to sit down for an interview with me in light of the recent publication…
Limited Time To Learn: How We Coach Busy Teachers
These small-lift, researched-based Card Drops prove to be a right-sized fit for continuous teacher-learning.
Four Lessons I learned from Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery is not just an intervention; it's an investment in students and teachers. Matt Renwick explains four lessons learned.
Increasing workplace flexibility means that schools can’t become more rigid
While the world of work has changed from an industrial system to more of a knowledge economy, our education system has been slow to adapt.
Leadership Questions to Help Guide Design of a Virtual School
This post was written by Jill Thompson and Allison Zmuda, and first published on Education Elements. To support the planning of opening a virtual school, leaders can be overwhelmed with the volume of questions to consider — logistics, strategy, and purpose to name a few. To guide the planning process, we offer the following table with phases of implementation with related questions. While the guide is set up sequentially, each phase may trigger a deeper articulation of previous…
Slow Pivots: What’s Driving the Change to Reimagine School Schedules?
This post was written by Jill Thompson and Allison Zmuda, and first published on Education Elements. School schedules and use of time are one of the few remaining relics of the industrialized learning model. Even when most schools moved to virtual learning in March 2020, many organizations replicated the existing bell schedule and instructed teachers to move their onsite instruction online. The school leaders believed it would hold teachers and students more accountable and…
Virtual Schooling Is Here to Stay: Reimagining Post-Pandemic Virtual Learning in Public Schools
By Jill Thompson and Allison Zmuda. This post was first published on Education Elements. From North Carolina to California to Alaska, public schools around the United States are planning to preserve a virtual school option for students after the pandemic is over. The constant drumbeat of getting all students back to school as quickly as possible does not tell the whole story of learning in the pandemic. Singing the praises of virtual learning was…
Heirlooms of Gratitude: Growing Opportunities and Skills through Culinary Enterprise
"Learn to be thankful for what you already have, while you pursue all that you want." —Jim Rohn The CROP Foundation is a young organization, just finding its roots in the local community. Incorporating gratitude into the very foundation of the program helps students understand their larger role in the community ecosystem. CROP, which stands for "creating opportunities", was established by Chef Kip Poole in 2014, when he was working as a culinary arts…
How to get class sizes down to 16 per teacher in a pandemic? Focus on families
This post is by Jethro Jones and was first published on JethroJones.com. It has been reposted with his permission. Start with Reducing Class Sizes One thing that teachers are always advocating for is lower class sizes. We have a unique opportunity to finally provide this to teachers, right away, and deal with the coronavirus situation in a much more supportive manner. I'll use actual, public data from my current school district to illustrate this.…
Responsive Return Strategies: Crafting Fresh Approaches to Schedules, Grouping of Students and Teachers and Shaping Both Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces
Part 4 of a 4-Part Series By Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Allison Zmuda The summer of 2020 is not a vacation for many educators who continue to work tirelessly to engage with their community on how to open school for the upcoming year. Each school and district continues to receive guidance from state, ministry, and national governments which may change suddenly given the unpredictability of the pandemic. In addition, the reality of implementing governmental guidelines…