Chalkbeat

Modern Career and Technical Education is for everyone. Here’s why it should start in middle school.

2023-10-11T15:49:06+00:00

By Patrick Keeney, Director of Career and Technical Education at McGraw Hill

When my grandfather entered the workforce with a seventh-grade education in the early twentieth century, he mined coal in western Pennsylvania, did factory work after serving in WWI, and retired as an City Councilman. My grandfather owned a home and a car and led a comfortable life. My father graduated high school toward the middle of the twentieth century and immediately took a job as a door-to-door salesman, a career he never left.

When I went to college, I started as a biology major. It quickly became clear that the path wasn’t right for me, so I visited a counselor to discuss my options and landed on a degree in physics education. After college, I spent time as an educator, then as a consultant for NASA, then an entrepreneur, then as a curriculum developer, and most recently as a product manager and strategist.

I share my family history not because it’s unique (many of us have parents with similarly linear career trajectories and have followed a winding path ourselves) but because it has informed my approach to career and technical education. Today, a path like mine – non-linear with a lot of unanswered questions in college – is simply unaffordable for students. Consider that the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s data show that the average younger baby boomer will have changed jobs 12.4 times between ages 18 and 54, and will change careers 5 to 7 times! Today’s students are unlikely to follow a simple path to a good job with limited education or debts as my father and grandfather did. For today’s students, something has to change.

Career and Technical Education is undergoing a revolution.

Between rising college costs, projections for jobs that don’t yet exist, and unprecedented developments in AI, students entering the workforce in the next few decades are stepping into uncharted and volatile terrain. Their paths to success will be marked with obstacles their teachers and trainers simply can’t foresee.

Career and technical education (CTE) is undergoing a revolution to keep pace. If you haven’t stayed abreast of changes happening in that space in the last few years, then now’s the time to unlearn everything you think you know about CTE. CTE is no longer an isolated track, “Vo-Tech” only for students who will not attend college. CTE is now for everyone, and it isn’t just about preparing for a single career. It’s about preparing students for any career, regardless of the path they take to get there, through exposure to career opportunities, work-based skills practice, and real-world practice of critical soft skills.

Modern CTE doesn’t have a clear beginning and end, either. Think of it this way: CTE is the sum of all your experiences that contribute to both your value in the workplace and your ability to create a workplace that is of value to you. It’s a coming-of-age story, for all learners and workers, for a lifetime.

CTE can change everything, for every learner.

The evidence is clear: CTE is effective. Consider this data story from the U.S. Department of Education. Researchers found that high school students who were CTE concentrators (students who earned two or more CTE credits within a single program of study) graduated from high school at higher rates than their non-concentrator peers, enrolled in postsecondary education within eight years of their expected high school graduation at slightly higher rates than non-concentrators, and were employed full-time at higher rates eight years after their expected high school graduation compared to non-concentrators.

In this groundbreaking study from Georgetown University, researchers found that CTE is one of a few key interventions that can lead to students landing better jobs. From the study: “There are 6.6 million youth in the current high school cohort who are not expected to enter a bachelor’s degree program by age 22 and who do not currently specialize in CTE in high school. If these youth received more high school CTE instruction, 186,000 more young adults in this cohort could have good jobs at age 30.”

To equitably prepare students for tomorrow, CTE must start in middle school.

Middle school CTE embodies the characteristics of modern career preparation: It exposes students to diverse career pathways, focuses on developing workforce-relevant soft skills, and gives them opportunities to better understand themselves, the world, and their place in it.

Middle school CTE empowers students to make informed decisions. We ask 18-year-olds to make complex decisions about their future that affect the rest of their financial lives. We owe it to them to equip them with all the information they need – about themselves and the workforce – to make informed decisions that limit their time incurring debts that will be difficult to pay back. A good middle school CTE curriculum is all about exploration and combats harmful, limiting stereotypes about who can do what jobs. It equips students with valuable information so they may intelligently decide what path to take in high school.

It’s never too early to practice soft skills. We cannot predict exactly how AI will change the workforce or what jobs will be created in the next decade. But we do know that as long as humans are humans, soft skills will be in demand. I would even go as far to say that I believe soft skills should be the core of all instruction, with technical skills secondary to transferrable skills. According to a study by LinkedIn (2023) 72% of American executives surveyed said soft skills are more valuable to their organization than AI skills. After spidering over a billion job listings, America Succeeds found that 7 out of the 10 most listed job requirements are related to soft skills. Soft skills aren’t “soft”!

Middle schoolers are developmentally ready for career-relevant work. Finally, CTE should begin in middle school because cognitive science indicates that middle schoolers are ready for it. The transferable skills that are so in demand from employers – like problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity – are a match for middle school-aged brains. Good middle school CTE delivers rigorous instruction through mediums that keep students engaged.

My own path has led me to McGraw Hill, where I’m currently leading the development of CTE programs. Our turn-key middle school program, Career Explorations, will be a driving force in the evolution of the education to workforce pathway. I’m excited to work alongside educators and students to continue to innovate career preparation for tomorrow’s generation of thinkers and doers.

For more on our CTE programs, see:

https://mhk12.us/3LTI7AL

—

Pat Keeney is the lead responsible for the K-12 Career Education portfolio at McGraw Hill, a curriculum publisher with decades of experience supporting teachers, students, and schools. As a strategic design expert, Pat has helped numerous organizations develop programs that locally, regionally, and globally serve the educational needs of schools and communities in 5 different decades. Pat’s efforts have helped organizations like NASA, Stride (formerly “K12 Inc.”), and McGraw Hill connect with teachers and students to deliver outstanding highly effective educational experiences. At McGraw Hill, Pat’s team of talented professionals share in helping create best in class, print and digital products that promote strong student achievement and support teachers. Pat is the father of two successful adult children, one a Millennial and the other a Gen Xer, who continue to follow their paths of fulfillment. Find out more about Pat at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachk23/ .

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

From Classroom to Life After School: Helping Students Thrive in the Real World

2023-06-16T15:19:38+00:00

“Why are we learning this?”

This question has been directed toward teachers and parents for generations, and a recent survey shows that students have good reason to be asking it.

In a system of standardized tests and grade-level benchmarks, it’s natural for students to question the real-world relevance of school—especially when they don’t necessarily want to pursue a traditional four-year college pathway. So while it’s necessary to emphasize academic rigor, schools also need to illustrate the eventual payoff of academics after school. It is through this action that schools can best fulfill their responsibility of building the talent pipeline to advance industries and communities.

It’s difficult for learners to persevere if schools don’t regularly take a beat to zoom out and show them the bigger picture. A Gates Foundation study found that 47% of high school dropouts attributed their disengagement to an inability to see connections between academic learning and their lives.

89% of high school graduates said they would be more motivated if they understood how their courses connected to careers, personal interests, or college acceptance.

Personal aspirations—like career outcomes and academic opportunities—are a useful way to help students tap into their drive to succeed in school. Once students see the purpose in what they’re learning, they get a reason to care. A proprietary survey revealed results aligned with this insight, with a staggering 89% of high school graduates reporting that tying coursework and class content to life outside the classroom helps boost motivation.

It makes sense. Renowned author Daniel Pink wrote that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the three key drivers behind intrinsic motivation. Mike Kaechele, educator and consultant, has used this framework to explore how a sense of purpose can help enhance student engagement—particularly through project-based learning, which shows students how class content can be applied beyond the four walls of the classroom.

73% said they’d be more likely to take advantage of internships or job shadows

58% said they’d be more active in their community

The survey findings also point to the impact that increased motivation can have on students’ behavior—not just in their own stories, but those of their community. Once motivated by the “why” behind their schoolwork, survey respondents overwhelmingly identified further positive behaviors they would engage in—from capitalizing on job shadowing and internship opportunities to volunteering in the community. Such behaviors result in a stronger talent pipeline across local industries and more civically engaged populations.

Helping students understand why they are learning specific material is a win-win for learners, communities, and economies at large.

Overall, these results underline the emerging importance of career-connected learning. Bringing life after school into the broader dialogue about school creates a steady stream of confident graduates—ready to shape the future of their community.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

How School Administration Can Bring Cleaner Water to their Students and Staff

2022-12-05T19:43:50+00:00

Adequate hydration and access to cleaner water is a crucial part of a student’s education. Not only do students feel better when properly hydrated, but they perform better academically, and attendance rates are higher.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, Detroit’s drinking water currently meets or exceeds the federal and state regulatory standards. However, many areas in Michigan are still reporting high lead levels. A 2020 statewide audit on public water systems revealed that only 2% of Benton Harbor, Michigan’s service lines could confirm zero traces of lead and 51% of the city’s remaining pipes were known to contain either lead or galvanized steel to lead lines.

Luckily, Michigan lawmakers recognize the importance of proper hydration in schools and have been taking steps to ensure that students have access to cleaner water.

The ‘Filter First’ water safety legislation that recently passed in the Michigan Senate aims to ensure that children have safer water to drink through a comprehensive program to install filters on drinking and cooking water sources in schools and childcare centers (Michigan League of Conservation Voters). Although legislation is a step in the right direction, these laws take time to take effect.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2021, the Department of Education announced the allocation that each state agency will receive under the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) Fund, totaling $122 billion in relief for K-12 schools (U.S. Department of Education).

ESSER funds can help school administrators to provide cleaner, filtered drinking water in their facilities by installing touchless fixtures and filtered drinking water units, like Elkay’s ezH2O® Bottle Filling Stations to encourage students and staff alike to stay hydrated throughout the day while mitigating the spread of germs.

With ESSER funds, administrators can ensure student attendance stays high by purchasing necessary upgrades. Take action for your school today – ESSER II funds expire September 30, 2023, and ESSER III funds expire September 30, 2024. Learn more about how to apply for ESSER Funds by visiting the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website.

One way to consider use of ESSER funds is by installing Elkay’s bottle filling stations that have NSF-certified filters that reduce lead and other contaminants in water and feature hands-free, sanitary operation, helping reduce the risk of germs spreading and thus, supporting uninterrupted in-person learning for students and staff.

The units include an exclusive Green Ticker™ that tells users the number of 20 oz. plastic water bottles that have been saved from waste, which makes for great sustainability teaching moments for students. Additionally, key plastic components on the unit have a special silver ion antimicrobial protection that inhibits the growth of mold and mildew.

Elkay believes that children in Michigan communities deserve cleaner and healthier water, especially where they’re learning and growing every day. When schools are equipped with no-touch fixtures and filtered drinking water units, the risk of spreading germs is reduced and students, staff and educators can reap the benefits.

Just last year, Elkay partnered with 501CTHREE to install a Water Box in Benton Harbor, where residents had been in need of cleaner drinking water due to elevated lead levels in their municipal water supply.

To learn more, visit Elkay’s K-12 Solutions page and contact your local Elkay Sales Representative to learn more about upgrading your school’s hydration and hand hygiene by using ESSER funds.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Leaders in education refine their voices to build inclusive, equitable schools

2022-10-19T13:34:26+00:00

While working as a teacher near where she grew up, Bronx native Rachel Phillips knew she needed to do more to address the glaring systemic inequities she saw in the school system. To gain new leadership skills, she chose to go back to school to earn her master’s of science in education in leadership in mathematics education at Bank Street Graduate School of Education. After graduating in 2021, she took those new leadership skills and her experience working in the New York City school system to the state of Rhode Island, where she is now an assistant principal at a Providence School District elementary school.

“Going back to school was the most profound learning experience I’ve ever had. It helped me to reflect on my own role as an educator and as a human being. It gave me hope and a strong belief in myself — that I have the tools to actually make a difference,” Phillips said. “The sense of support and community at Bank Street modeled what I needed to do as a leader. We would bring a problem of practice from our school and give each other feedback on how we could improve. This feedback was always in the form of a conversation. We pushed each other’s thinking, especially about cultural responsiveness. Even when there were moments of uncomfortability in learning, I was never embarrassed but rather motivated to become a better educator and grow as a person.”

“Getting a degree in leadership was transformative for me.” —Jeanette De Jesus

Research shows high-quality school leadership is second only to classroom instruction in the success of student learning, and school leaders have an important effect on creating and sustaining a positive school culture. To help increase the number of well-prepared, culturally responsive school leaders, Bank Street is expanding online access to its programs so experienced prekindergarten through 12th-grade educators across all 50 states can have the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in educational leadership.

Anthony Conelli is the chair of Bank Street’s educational leadership programs. “We view leaders as facilitators of learning,” he said. “Like all of our leadership programs, our expanded online offerings develop well-prepared leaders who are ready to build inclusive, equitable schools that can provide all students with a foundation for success in both school and in life.”

Bank Street’s historic learner-centered approach to teaching and learning combines the study of human development and education theory with sustained clinical practice in schools. The online programs retain the foundational components of Bank Street’s renowned preparation model while combining the convenience of online coursework and personalized fieldwork experiences.

With a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Jeanette De Jesus began her career as an attorney before switching careers and becoming a New York City Teaching Fellow. After earning her first master’s degree in education from Fordham, she worked as a public school teacher for 16 years before she completed Bank Street Graduate School of Education’s Progressive Leadership program in 2021. Now, as an inclusion instruction coach, De Jesus helps schools across the New York City area implement and maintain inclusive programming that supports special education services in the least restrictive environments.

De Jesus, who grew up in public housing and dropped out of high school at one point, is inspired to advance as a leader so she can help dismantle the kinds of inequities she faced as a student. “I am proof that we have an opportunity through education to empower young people to change their lives,” she said. “And as a teacher, I realized that I needed to keep walking the walk. Getting a degree in leadership was transformative for me.”

De Jesus discovered that leadership is not only about creating a collaborative and cohesive school culture and environment, but it’s also about cultivating other leaders. “In a public school system where justice and racial equity still remains very much at the surface level, I now know how to work to build safe spaces that support healthy social-emotional development not just for students, including the many children of color who may struggle emotionally and behaviorally, but also for our teachers,” she said.

At the core of Bank Street’s preparation model is building a relationship of trust between instructors and students, which allows aspiring leaders to explore, challenge, and refine their approach to leadership as they grow and develop throughout the program. This relationship mirrors the way the Bank Street approach encourages adults to work with children and models how leaders can successfully work with teachers, colleagues, and communities.

For Carlos Velazquez, fond childhood memories of the safe and nurturing environments of his after-school programs in East Harlem became the inspiration for a community-based leadership career. A master’s degree in social work in 2007 from Syracuse University led to a position as chief program officer for the Boys’ Club of New York, and a second master’s degree in educational leadership from Bank Street encouraged him to do even more. As executive director of the New York City Police Athletic League, Velazquez oversees its network of after-school programs, organized sports, summer camps, teen centers, and Head Start programs, all of which foster understanding and productive relationships among police officers and community youth. He credits the leadership knowledge he attained at Bank Street for his confidence and expert leadership in the unique field of youth development.

Velazquez said, “Sometimes staff members feel like they have to be on the ground all the time. They see the needs of the youth in front of them and lose sight of the issues in the communities they serve that cause all of this need. Bank Street gave me better insight into how to merge the needs of both the youth and the teachers who serve the youth. By building strong programs and strong systems, I’ve learned that the effect I have on the adults who do the work is more impactful than anything I’ve done hands-on in the classroom. By training the next group of talented leaders, my impact on the community is even greater.”

Conelli credits the success of these leaders in education to Bank Street’s unique approach to leader preparation.

“In addition to coursework, Bank Street graduate students learn to be leaders and to train other leaders through conversation, collaboration, and hands-on engagement with materials, ideas, and people,” he said. “Through fieldwork placements that are closely mentored, our students have the opportunity to practice being leaders on-site, securing ongoing feedback from mentor administrators and faculty advisors. They process what they are learning so they can integrate it into their practice.”

“This approach produces confident, effective leaders who are able to model culturally responsive leadership to other community members as they collaborate, which can make a powerful difference,” Cornelli said.

Upon program completion, students graduate from Bank Street’s leadership programs with:

A commitment to personal development. Students develop deep knowledge of child and adult development and a unique understanding of how they themselves and other individuals learn. Graduates learn to become thoughtful problem-solvers who can work collaboratively and respectfully with others while building critical thinking skills, courage, and confidence.
The tools and knowledge required for 21st century school leadership. Equipped with the observation, reflection, and communication skills needed to support teachers and their students, graduates become adept at community building and transforming schools to better meet the needs of students, families, and teachers.
An ability to advance equitable and inclusive schools. Graduates become change agents and advocates for social justice and equity in education. Guided by a commitment to a culturally responsive approach to teaching and learning, aspiring leaders develop deep insight into how to best incorporate anti-racist teachings inside the classroom and how to build the school systems and structures that support school and career readiness for all students.

You can learn more about the nationally available online progressive leadership program at Bank Street Graduate School of Education here.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Experts Say Phonics Is One of Four Essential Factors for Reading Success

2022-10-14T15:43:25+00:00

More than 200 of New York City’s elementary schools* lack direct phonics-based instruction, while more than half of students in grades 3 to 8 are not proficient readers, according to state tests.** To address this, the city will move towards a phonics-based approach for all elementary schools — a tall order when the debate over how to most effectively teach reading has raged for decades. While the move to phonics is necessary, it’s important to realize that state officials have mandated more than just phonics, and that phonics alone is not a game changer.

More than phonics

Phonics is one component in a comprehensive body of evidence known as the Science of Reading. Embraced by educators nationwide because it is based on scientific evidence of how the brain learns to read, the research indicates that — unlike learning to talk — learning to read does not come naturally for us. Moreover, although some people have conflated the Science of Reading with phonics instruction due to its strong emphasis on phonics and the fact that it has been politicized, it goes far deeper. It is not a single instructional program, nor is it phonics-only; rather, this research proves that learning to read requires explicit, systematic, and cumulative instruction in five essential literacy components. As such, the New York City mandate calls for school phonics programs to be combined with a comprehensive literacy program that includes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluent text reading, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Science of Reading proves to be a game changer for educators

Despite its clear value, the Science of Reading was not part of most educators’ training, nor was it incorporated into the majority of college programs. As a result, teachers who enrolled in programs like Lexia® LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) have characterized learning a Science of Reading-based Structured Literacy approach as “life-changing.”

Not far from New York City, the New Rochelle School District implemented LETRS.

“This course has been the single most impactful professional development initiative that I have ever attended in my 20 years of teaching,” said Holly Bruni, an ELA facilitator and reading teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in New Rochelle.

With LETRS, educators develop a deeper scientific understanding of why students struggle to read and are better equipped to support diverse learners of all kinds.

Resources for schools

“Far too many of our kids do not have a solid, foundational core in literacy,” New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks recently said. “We’ve got to do things differently.”

While change can be inconvenient, applying five decades of gold-standard research into how students learn to read will be a game changer for New York City students, teachers, and school leaders. For more information on the Science of Reading and the professional learning programs that support this body of evidence, download our white paper, It’s More Than Phonics: Dispelling the Biggest Myth About the Science of Reading.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

A rural school district in Arkansas leads the way in supporting students through community schools

2022-05-31T14:23:33+00:00

Laura Howard, community schools coordinator in Batesville, AR, has a message for communities throughout her state that want to improve student engagement and learning: The community schools strategy works.

“Community schools enable school districts to work in partnership with surrounding community organizations to ensure that students receive all that is vital to their success,” Howard said. “They represent an intentional effort to increase students’ and families’ access to many different types of support. Even if a school district is already providing extended learning opportunities and other student supports, the community schools approach provides a framework to build on those areas where the district is light and where students would benefit from access to additional resources.”

In 2020, with grant and technical support from The NEA Foundation, the Batesville community embraced the community schools strategy and tailored it to the community’s specific needs. The goal of the strategy is to increase support and opportunities available to all students in this city of approximately 10,0000 people, located 80 miles north of Little Rock. Sixty percent of students in the Batesville School District are eligible to participate in the federal free and reduced-price meal program, and 17% of the students are English language learners. The ethnic and racial makeup of the student population is 62.6% white, 26.5% Hispanic/Latino, 5.7% Black/African American, 1.1% Asian, 0.5% Native American, 0.5% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 3.4% two or more races.

Among rural communities like Batesville, as well as in urban areas nationally, community schools have been proven to represent a powerful strategy for achieving the goal of educational equity. Research indicates that community schools often show improvements in student attendance and behavior, academic outcomes, and college matriculation rates — particularly in places where access to resources historically has been inequitable and where students’ prior success rates pointed to the need for significantly increased support.

Using schools as hubs, community schools bring together educators, families, policymakers, and community partners to increase students,’ families’ and even entire communities’ access to coordinated academic, health and wellness, developmental, cultural, and other resources and opportunities. The impact of community schools has been especially visible during the pandemic. Given their often-extensive partnerships, community schools were able to quickly mobilize and continue educational and other support services for families and neighborhoods hit hardest.

Last year, Arkansas passed legislation recognizing community schools as an evidence-based approach for school improvement. Howard says this has had the effect of building awareness and an understanding of the community schools strategy across the state.

It is important to note that the bill does not require any school or district to implement the community schools approach; nor does it change school governance or structure. Rather, it affirms that community schools create new learning and developmental opportunities for students, and they remove barriers to learning through what commonly are referred to as the schools’ “four pillars of support” for students, schools, and communities.

In Batesville, for instance, here is what the four pillars look like in practice.

Pillar one: integrated student supports

In addition to telemedicine clinics, school-based mental health support, hot spots, and food distribution programs, Batesville’s Coordinated Care Network has become an integral feature of the district’s community schools strategy. Through the network, the district offers families support beyond what an individual school can provide, such as connecting them to medical care or clothing services, and helping out with home or car repairs or even a house fire. When a student’s family faces a particularly daunting challenge, educators coordinate support to meet the request by submitting a request for support. Community partners received text messages and can send donations to the network.

Pillar two: expanded learning time and opportunities

One of Batesville’s many expanded learning programs and opportunities associated with its community schools strategy is Camp Pioneer, a seven-week, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. summer camp for students ages 5–12. Another is the district’s E3 (Experience, Exposure and Excellence) Internship and Apprentice Program, offered in partnership with the National Apprenticeship Training Foundation. E3 provides students at Batesville High School with opportunities to gain paid work experience through local businesses and industries.

Pillar three: family and community engagement

Last year, in addition to a home visiting team and Excel by 8, the statewide early learning program, Batesville created the Pioneer Parent Academy. With the pandemic limiting opportunities to be in school buildings, the district began creating videos to provide useful information to parents and strengthen the school-home connection. Topics included supporting students’ social and emotional development, navigating the college selection and financial aid processes, and instructional resources. The videos are shared through social media, a website, and a notification system for families. Each video offers a Google form so that families can ask follow-up questions.

Pillar four: collaborative leadership and practices

Examples of the school district’s emphasis on collaborative leadership include its robust implementation of the state-required Health and Wellness and Family Engagement committees. Through these committees, family and community members come together with educators and administrators to study district needs assessment data and collaboratively respond to the data, continuously improving the school system’s ability to support students.

What distinguishes a community school from others is its hyper-focus on aligning and integrating these varied supports into a comprehensive and cohesive whole. That alignment is facilitated by the community school coordinator who works closely with school and district administrators and others committed to the complex work of coordinating the contributions of multiple school partners.

Moving from concept to reality

Work to develop community schools in Arkansas began in 2016 when ForwARd Arkansas, a public-private partnership whose mission is to build statewide conditions to prepare students for increased opportunities in life, began convening the Arkansas Coalition for Community Schools in partnership with others such as the Arkansas Education Association.

With funding and technical support from The NEA Foundation to conduct needs assessments, hire community schools coordinators, and learn about best practices in community school development, Arkansas Coalition for Community Schools and community leaders launched Arkansas’ first community schools in Little Rock and Batesville.

Using the community schools framework, Batesville has since developed a districtwide approach to braid together a range of supports and opportunities personalized to students from preschool through high school.

The effort has paid off. As Michael Hester, superintendent of Batesville School District, says, “This model is authentic, and it is engaging our community and parents.”

To learn more about the community schools strategy and how Arkansas schools are using it to serve students, visit https://forwardarkansas.org/blog/closing-gaps-opening-doors/.

To learn more about how the community schools strategy might serve your community, check out https://communityschools.futureforlearning.org/assets/downloads/community-schools-playbook.pdf.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Encouraging access to clean water for students, educators, and beyond

2022-05-25T18:10:54+00:00

Water is essential to children’s and educators’ health. The body works better when it’s hydrated because water is essential for numerous reasons:

Growth and development
Regulating body weight
Improving quality of sleep
Contributing to healthy digestion
Enhancing physical activity performance
Normalizing the body’s normal functions
Improving cognition and concentration

Not to mention, access to clean water increases overall attendance in schools, therefore improving overall academic performance.

Despite the benefits of healthy, filtered drinking water, many schools across the United States lack access to clean water. Last year, an estimated 13 million American children went to schools where officials found elevated levels of lead (U.S Government Accountability Office). Students and educators across the United States risk exposure to lead, copper, and other toxins in their water (American Water Works Association). On top of that, according to the CDC, one in five children and adolescents do not drink any plain water during the day, and about half of school-aged children are under-hydrated.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that drinking water can make up 20% or more of a person’s total exposure to lead. Lead is particularly dangerous to children because their growing bodies absorb more lead than adults do, and their brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to the damaging effects of lead. Even low levels of lead in the blood of children can result in behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, slowed growth, hearing problems and anemia (EPA).

Luckily, many areas are implementing new regulations to provide clean, filtered water in schools and their communities across the country, in addition to new grants, like the CARES Act or the LCR, being offered to assist in furthering the access to clean water. However, some of these laws take time to be put into action and often require revisions (EPA).

As more students have returned to school this year, it is more important than ever to not only motivate those in schools to drink more water, but to encourage administrators to provide access to clean water in their facilities.

One of the best ways to encourage access to clean drinking water and hydration is by installing bottle filling stations throughout schools. Elkay Manufacturing’s ezH2O Bottle Filling Stations have NSF-certified filters that reduce lead and other contaminants in water and feature hands-free, sanitary operation.

Not to mention, the units include an exclusive green ticker that tell users the number of 20 ounce plastic water bottles that have been saved from waste, making great teaching moments for kids about health, sustainability, environmentalism, and more.

Elkay believes that children and educators deserve clean water, especially where they’re learning and growing every day. Through Elkay’s Fountains for Youth program, fresh, filtered drinking water is provided through the donation and installation of ezH2O Bottle Filling Stations to allow the teaching of healthy hydration habits for life and encouraging access to healthy water for students and educators alike.

Just last year, Elkay donated 101 bottle filling stations to be installed on Chicago’s South and West sides in the city’s schools, parks, youth centers, and community facilities, to bring access to clean drinking water across locations that need it most while helping reduce single-use plastic waste. Elkay aims to expand these efforts and continue to bring clean, filtered water to communities that need it most.

Learn more about Elkay’s bottle filling stations at elkay.com or visit elkay.com/fountainsforyouth to learn more about Fountains for Youth and how to talk to your local school about installing water bottle filling stations.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Putting summer melt on ice! How to help students get to postsecondary day one

2022-05-09T18:14:58+00:00

The decision to pursue a postsecondary degree is one of the most consequential a high school student will make. Committing to testing, researching schools, submitting applications, and securing financial aid all amount to an intense, time-consuming process that can shape students’ futures. So why, after all that work, do 10-40% of students stop short of attending their first day of college classes?

Enter the dreaded “summer melt.” The three-month period between high school graduation and the first day of college enrollment can be full of pitfalls, especially for first-generation students and students from low- to moderate-income households. Despite registering for classes and showing every intention of beginning college, a significant number of students melt away over the summer.

“I take down their personal email and just try to have multiple ways to communicate with them. I make sure I have several phone numbers or maybe even add them on social media if they feel comfortable,” said Tania Valencia, a teacher at Digital Arts & Cinema Technology High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. Valencia teaches the OneGoal class to juniors and seniors at her school to prepare in part for this critical transition between high school graduation and the first day on their postsecondary pathway.

Maintaining social bonds through the summer can help students focus on their postsecondary goals. Photo courtesy of OneGoal.

OneGoal is a national postsecondary access and success organization working to close the degree divide between students from low-income communities and their high-income peers. After high school graduation, teachers like Valencia continue postsecondary advising during the summer and through the critical first year of higher education, which takes some adjustment. Students “need to feel comfortable enough to share with me without fearing they’ll disappoint me,” Valencia said, “ and if they come up against trouble I want them to understand I’m not your parent, I’m no longer your teacher, I’m here to mentor and advise you, so come to me and let me find a way to support you.”

The causes of summer melt include financial shortfalls, losing access to guidance counselors, a lack of generational knowledge about navigating postsecondary enrollment from family members, missing deadlines outlined in emails or mail from their postsecondary institution, and losing track of important documents.

It’s important for student advisors, teachers, and parents to regularly check-in with college bound students over the summer to prevent “melting” before their first day of postsecondary enrollment. Photo courtesy of OneGoal.

Even minor setbacks can have devastating consequences for students. So, how can parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and community members ensure that vulnerable students avoid summer melt?

Create a summer checklist

Make a spreadsheet with columns for action steps, due dates, and links to resources or phone numbers needed to complete each task. Action steps might include having the student snap and send you a photo of their FAFSA award letter, signing into their postsecondary institution online account and completing their profile, signing up for orientation, checking their college email, sending final high school transcripts, and registering for classes. Having a checklist can help break the process up into smaller, attainable steps.

Consistent communication

Texting is one of the most effective ways to reach students, but as Valencia said, “It can be easy to lose touch, so I always have a backup, whether it’s dad, mom, or a close friend.” Using the students’ summer checklist, set reminders based on the deadlines to touch base via text, phone call, or direct message over social media with consent from the student.

Address mental health concerns

The lingering effects of the pandemic have added new layers of difficulty for students and depression, anxiety, and severe mental health disorders are on the rise in schools across the United States. “It’s even harder now, so I come ready with mental health tips or guidelines for students who are showing signs of depression,” said Valencia. Lack of sleep, excessive screen time, and disconnection from social supports can compound these existing mental health concerns, and it’s important for students to have adults they can confide in. Know your limitations, however, and be ready to refer students to a trained therapist or counselor if they need extra support.

Students disproportionately at risk of melting over the summer need trusted adults to help get them to day one of their postsecondary journeys. While organizations like OneGoal partner with educators to effectively support students, social support from friends, family, and community members are key components in a young person’s path to postsecondary enrollment, persistence, and graduation.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

TCS Education System tackles rural healthcare crisis with new medical college

2022-02-22T14:56:11+00:00

For Michael Horowitz, PhD, president of TCS Education System, community need and organizational strategy have always gone hand in hand. And nowhere is community need more urgent than across rural America and other underserved communities, where a dire shortage of trained health care professionals has left millions of people with inadequate access to routine health care and vital emergency services.

As a leader focused on education and community, Horowitz first became concerned about the enormous disparity in healthcare access decades ago, and in 2018, began exploring the question that has always been at the heart of TCS’s mission: How can we help our national community? From this inquiry, the Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine, (known as KansasCOM) — the first private, nonprofit medical school in the state of Kansas — was born.

Visionary purpose, practical expertise

A small group of passionate stakeholders from the Wichita-based Kansas Health Science Center and Riverside Health Foundation shared the vision for what would become KansasCOM. TCS brought the idea from its infancy to a pilot stage in 2018. Leveraging decades of expertise in higher education, Horowitz and the TCS leadership team were instrumental in establishing the financing, leadership, and infrastructure for the new school. TCS was the vital catalyst in aggregating millions of dollars in capital and accessing low-cost borrowing from multiple channels including Wichita’s Riverside Health Foundation and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, TCS’s largest university. TCS also managed the complex legal and regulatory processes that accompanied every aspect of launching the college, from real estate and land purchasing to licensing and accreditation.

“We’ve known for a while that establishing a medical school was the right move for our organization, but it had to be the right kind of medical school,” said TCS chief operating officer Deborah Markos. “We believe solving big societal problems requires tackling issues upstream with education and educational access. Health care is no different.”

During the KansasCOM planning stage, the TCS network proved essential in establishing the Kansas Health Science Center Board of Trustees and recruiting top administrators to lead the new initiative. This included the science center’s current president, Tiffany Masson, PsyD, who formerly served as a dean at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Ronnie Troy, a board member with community partner Riverside Health Foundation, described how the influx of expertise and talent from TCS propelled the new college from idea to activation: “We saw the need and we were willing to financially support this endeavor, but we didn’t necessarily know everything we needed to know. TCS was the missing piece of the puzzle.”

Building on a tradition of community commitment

While the TCS investment in communities underserved by health care is particularly timely, the organization’s commitment to community advancement through education is nothing new. Horowitz founded TCS — known as “The Community Solution in Higher Education” — in 2009, when slowing enrollments and rising operational costs began to threaten the financial stability of hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities. Together with the TCS founding Board of Trustees, Horowitz forged a new resource-sharing model driven by visionary ambition and radical cooperation that has helped TCS institutions survive, thrive and grow, while enhancing student outcomes.

TCS has expanded its model to universities seeking to share in its success as well as provide an education grounded in the principles of social responsibility and benefitting the global community.

“We’re strongly focused on the underserved, and we plan to make a community impact from day one,” said Kansas Health Science Center board chair Vadim Levitin, MD. “That makes us different from many medical schools, and it’s important, because it’s where the need is.”

The vision for KansasCOM, which will be located in Wichita, builds on a local tradition of osteopathic medical excellence that dates back as far as the 1950s. In addition to being part of a proud local legacy, osteopathy is also the best discipline to meet the community’s needs, given the inherent synergies between the “whole person” osteopathic philosophy and much-needed primary care.

Establishing a local pipeline of health care providers will begin before the first class of medical students even graduates, said KHSC president Masson. “Our goal is to get our students involved in community work from day one of their education. We know that the more students work in the community throughout their training, the more apt they are to want to do their residencies here in Kansas, and the more likely we are to retain them in the state over the course of their careers.”

Making tangible change where it matters most

In December 2021, KansasCOM received pre-accreditation from the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, enabling it to begin recruiting its first class of students for the fall of 2022. Despite the challenges of operating in today’s unpredictable economy and health care landscape, Dr. Horowitz sees a bright future for KansasCOM, and a model for other communities to emulate.

“Operating a college successfully involves putting a lot of highly complex pieces together,” he explains. “In Wichita, we assembled all the pieces — the passion, the expertise, the network. As this world-class medical institution fulfills the promise of transforming the face of health care across Kansas, we hope that other communities facing this challenge are inspired to pursue a similar model in the future.”

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

The role of voice technology in equitable literacy instruction

2022-01-31T14:24:15+00:00

As evidence continues to indicate that learning loss has disproportionately affected students of color, the pandemic only heightens the need to tackle the persistent, devastating reading achievement gaps that hold back underserved student populations in literacy.

Students and teachers cannot afford to continue operating within a framework that only enables learning for some — they need tools that allow them personalize at scale, address a wide range of unique needs, and ultimately empower every child to learn to read.

For Sean Ryan, McGraw Hill School Group president, voice technology can help make personalized instruction not only more scalable, but also more equitable. That’s why McGraw Hill is partnering with SoapBox Labs, a voice artificial intelligence company whose proprietary speech engine has been recognized by customers as incredibly accurate for young students’ voices. The SoapBox Labs voice engine caters to the complexities of children’s speech, which is often happening in noisy environments. It also accommodates the wide diversity in children’s accents and dialects, and respects the privacy expectations of teachers and parents.

Both Ryan and Martyn Farrows, the CEO of SoapBox Labs, share a vision of voice-enabled experiences as a new learning superpower for kids at home and in the classroom. In the Q&A below, Ryan and Farrows share the objectives of their partnership, their approach to leveraging voice technology for equitable instruction, and their vision for the future of teaching and learning.

What about SoapBox Lab’s approach to voice technology aligns to McGraw Hill’s vision for the future of teaching and learning?

Ryan: The modern classroom presents obstacles that even the most skilled educator cannot be expected to overcome — the tools and frameworks that may have worked before no longer meet the needs of students or provide teachers with adequate support. We need to center our solutions around the understanding that every child, every educator, and every school are unique, and so are their teaching and learning needs. It’s all about guiding teachers and students on their unique paths, but with an awareness of the ever-changing environmental and contextual factors that shape those paths.

SoapBox Labs’ voice technology was created with both individual needs and learning context in mind. The technology is of course designed to address the needs of each individual student as they read, speak, and receive feedback. But what’s most compelling to me is the company’s approach to understanding children as inherently independent from adults in the way they interact with voice technology, their voices and speech patterns, and even the noisy, busy environments in which they use voice technology. SoapBox addresses students’ unique needs in real-world environments.

What sets the technology at SoapBox Labs apart from other voice technology?

Farrows: SoapBox’s speech recognition technology leads the market for a number of reasons. It’s proprietary and built to cater exclusively to 2–12-year-old kids’ voices. Most other speech systems are built primarily on adult voice data. Adult voice tech does not work well for kids because it’s not designed to accommodate the complexities of children’s speech and behaviors, their diverse accents and dialects, their noisy environments, and their privacy needs.

The accuracy of our voice engine also sets us apart by understanding kids’ speech down to the phoneme level. This is a game-changer for education companies, particularly for early literacy and reading fluency use cases, where identifying subtleties in a child’s pronunciation (if they substituted “color” for “other”, for example) can have a big impact on their literacy progress. The unique and granular data points generated by SoapBox’s voice engine — including words correct per minute, insertions, deletions, substitutions, and more — populate teacher dashboards in near real time giving them immediate and longitudinal perspectives on a student’s progress and pinpointing areas where more specific instruction or intervention may be needed.

Prioritizing equity in literacy instruction is critical for K–12 schools. Can you explain how SoapBox Lab’s voice technology is designed to empower all students and drive equitable outcomes in literacy?

Farrows: “Accurate, high performance voice technology is a key driver of equity in literacy instruction in the classroom and the home. These tools need to understand all kids equally and deliver feedback to students and their teachers that is as accurate as a human assessor.

Here’s why this is so important: If a voice system generates a false negative — by telling a child they read something wrong when, in fact, they read it correctly — it will damage that child’s confidence. While a voice-powered tool that generates a false positive — telling a child they’re right when they are wrong — denies that child a valuable learning opportunity.

Now let’s imagine that we have a voice system for remote or classroom learning that responds accurately to half of the students in a class but misunderstands the accents and dialects of the other half of the students. An experience like this has huge negative implications for individual kids and deepens issues of equity and bias in the classroom and far beyond.

We’ve worked hard to ensure that our speech tech treats all kids’ voices equally, regardless of age, race, accent, or dialect. Our technology is built on thousands of hours of kids’ speech data from 192 countries and is highly accurate, returning pronunciation scores down to the level of individual phonemes.

In fact, our technology has been independently validated to show no bias across the wide ranges of race, accent, and socio-economic backgrounds you’d find for example in an urban classroom. That kind of validation is the result of 8-plus years of commitment by our speech tech and engineering teams, and we’re exceptionally proud of it.

It might seem counterintuitive to look to technology as a solution to such a uniquely human problem as educational inequity, with all of its very human nuances and complexities. How do you view the intersection of tech and equity in that context?

Ryan: Technology is created by humans with all of their inherent biases. Fortunately, we also have the ability to recognize and correct our biases, at least with a certain degree of error and subjectivity. (Admittedly this is very challenging work!). When technology is designed by humans who are committed to recognizing and actively correcting biases, it has the potential to create a much more objective environment for learning than most humans can be expected to consistently replicate at scale. That’s what’s important about the work SoapBox Labs is doing: They designed technology with a deep awareness of bias and work to negate those biases with their incredible commitment to accuracy. It’s a very active, very reflective, and truly human approach to software development. In the hands of thoughtful educators and in the context of a culturally responsive curriculum, it will be a powerful tool.

Education is a uniquely human endeavor, in a complex context with interacting variables. But this very human approach to creating technology that recognizes and mitigates our biases is created with the complexities of a classroom environment in mind. It is my hope that technology will move us toward a place where students are guaranteed the instructional support and attention they deserve, regardless of their background, experience, or identity.

What’s on the horizon for voice technology in the classroom that you believe will have the most meaningful impact on students and teachers?

Farrows: I see interactive learning experiences powered by voice technology becoming more expected, trusted, and accepted by educators in the classroom, by the education community more broadly, and by parents. Additionally, teachers and school districts will derive increasingly greater value from the data generated by voice-powered tools and will leverage the data that populates teacher dashboards, to support new intervention and instruction tools and processes.

Ryan: I’m most excited by the prospect of putting thoughtful technologies in the hands of compassionate educators who recognize that it’s not simply about more, faster, cheaper. It’s also about a deeper and more complete understanding of each student over time. With a variety of pedagogical approaches that deploy a near-limitless variety of learning resources, we can move beyond linear content progressions. We can also include the student engagement factor, which is naturally influenced by student background, experience, and belief systems. I expect that existing practices will give way where we prove superior results. This will take time, but far less time than it’s ever taken in the history of our industry. Thoughtful technology-enabled personalized assessment and instruction is, by its very definition, a more equitable approach to education.

Dr. Martyn Farrows joined SoapBox Labs in 2017 as chief operations officer to lead operations, business development, and strategic partnerships. He was appointed to the role of CEO in May 2021.

Farrows’ professional experience has been focused on learning technologies and artificial intelligence for children. He is an experienced public speaker on data privacy and children, and has been a member of the Irish Government’s Data Forum since its inception in June 2015. He was previously director of the Learnovate Centre, a strategic investment by the Irish government to establish Ireland as a global centre of excellence in learning innovation.

Farrows holds a Ph.D in European politics and in the early part of his career worked for the European Commission and European Parliament.

Sean Ryan is president of McGraw Hill’s School group, which is responsible for providing PreK–12 educators and learners with programs, tools, and services supported by differentiated pedagogical instruction and purposeful technology. He was named to his position in April 2020 after serving as CEO of Wall Family Enterprise and before that as senior vice president and general manager of Fuel Education, where he was responsible for strategy, marketing, sales, implementation, support. and product development for the business.

Prior to these roles, Ryan was senior vice president of Sales, Service & Platform at McGraw Hill, leading the school group’s sales, implementation, and training organization. His long career in education includes high-profile roles at Campus Management, Scantron Corporation, and The Princeton Review of Japan. Ryan is also a former military intelligence officer, having served in a variety of capacities in the United States and abroad and rising to the rank of captain.

Ryan graduated with a master’s of science degree in management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a master’s of arts in international relations from the University of Arizona, and a bachelor’s degree in Soviet studies from the United States Air Force Academy.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

A closer look at the ransomware problem

2022-01-03T15:39:00+00:00

Article written by Rob Cataldo, Managing Director, North America, Kaspersky

Heading into 2021, security researchers had predicted that the scourge of ransomware attacks against K–12 schools could continue to get worse. They were right. But there are signs of hope.

Last month, President Biden directed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to review the cybersecurity risks facing school districts and develop guidelines and resources to help them.

The move came after an avalanche of ransomware attacks against schools across the country since the spring of 2020, right when internet-connected resources became crucial for educators. Attackers have locked up schools’ IT systems and demanded millions of dollars to release them, and in some cases leaked sensitive student data when the district didn’t pay.

In May 2021, Kaspersky surveyed parents of school-age children in the United States and found that a startling 55% of them had experienced cyberattacks on their kids’ schools. This fall, we again surveyed parents for a closer look at ransomware attacks, finding that 9% of parents said their child’s school has suffered a ransomware attack during the child’s time at the school.

The attacks came with a cost beyond just ransom payments. More than 60% of parents who reported an attack said their child had personal data stolen in the incident. Sadly, this was the outcome that surveyed parents had said they fear the most. It’s a serious privacy issue that can get overshadowed by the large ransoms sometimes paid to attackers. As with any data breach, students’ passwords and other personal info can end up for sale on the dark web and be used for future criminal activity.

The attacks also usually forced schools to close, if only for a relatively short period of time. Three in four victimized schools had to close for at least a day, and the average closure lasted 2.3 days, according to the surveyed parents. None of the respondents reported a closure of more than a week, and ultimately 80% of parents said they were happy with the school’s response to the situation.

The financial damage tends to vary, although most schools appear to take some kind of hit. More than seven in 10 parents who reported attacks said their school paid a ransom in order to remedy the situation. The ransoms generally were not nightmarishly large, however. Less than 4% of those reporting attacks said the paid ransom, to their knowledge, was over $1 million, while the most commonly reported payments were $100,000 or less.

But even for relatively small payoffs, the attacks will likely continue as long as schools remain vulnerable. So an important answer to the problem is in strengthening schools’ defenses on a larger scale. Many schools have already been working to educate staff, students, and parents about best security practices, and 80% of surveyed parents said their school has taken such steps. But the next step is for school systems to get an official set of standards to follow, as well as resources to help them get there. The CISA guidelines will hopefully mark a significant milestone in the fight against the ransomware problem.

If your school is hit with a ransomware attack, we urge administrators to contact the FBI rather than paying the attackers. New decryptors are often made available on NoMoreRansom.org, which also has guidance for schools to mitigate risk. Administrators can also get support from the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. If you’re a teacher and want to do your part to help ward off future attacks, take a look at this digital toolkit for educators.

Rob Cataldo is managing director, North America at Kaspersky, a global cybersecurity and digital privacy company.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Students know what they need socially, emotionally, and academically — let’s listen

2021-10-26T18:57:44+00:00

Written by Sean Ryan, President, McGraw Hill School Group

This unique school year carries a weight that feels rather overwhelming. To support students in a post- (or, rather, ongoing) pandemic era, we must address social and emotional issues while also closing the academic gaps exacerbated by learning loss.

At first glance, these objectives might appear independent of one another — or even at odds. It’s a real concern that stressing rigor and remediation could feed a deficit mindset. Many parents and educators are rightfully concerned that efforts to accelerate unfinished learning could inadvertently and negatively impact student wellbeing.

However, what we know about the relationship between social, emotional, and academic learning would instead indicate that these objectives are in fact inextricably linked, and best addressed with an integrated, holistic approach that places student voices at the center of learning.

The social and emotional impact of the pandemic is complex and intertwined with academic impacts.

To get a clear picture of this year’s unique social and emotional challenges, we conducted a survey of educators, administrators, and parents on the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL for short) and the effects of COVID on student wellbeing. Here’s what we learned:

Fifty-three percent of educators said COVID and/or the shift to remote learning has caused their students emotional distress and created attendance problems.
Administrators and educators report that meaningful numbers of students have “given up” on school and show signs of depression, loneliness, and anxiety. They note that student confidence has plummeted, and many have disengaged from learning.
Educators believe that SEL will help provide short-term benefits such as reduced behavioral problems (96%), improved grades (91%), and less emotional distress (95%).

Unpacking these results (which you can review in full here), underscores the connection between SEL and academic learning: A student’s ability to rebound from learning loss is dependent on their confidence with content, engagement with instruction, and overall well-being.

How do we empower learners socially, emotionally, and academically without defaulting to an approach that neglects the interdependencies of each element?

While there are many ways to approach the cross-sections of SEL and academic achievement, an initial focus on the student is recommended by the research. Listening to students and empowering them to own their learning can be a powerful driver of attending to the considerable social, emotional, and academic needs this year.

Prioritize student agency

The educators interviewed in our survey reported concerns that many of their students had “given up” on school during remote learning. Promoting student agency is critical to ensuring that students get excited about learning this year. Learning science research indicates that giving students opportunities for autonomy in learning can boost motivation. They are best positioned as active stakeholders with a role to play in how they learn and interact with lessons, rather than as passive recipients of information.

Promote a growth mindset

Just as we can’t let unfinished learning continue to hold back student achievement, we also can’t let students feel like the learning losses they experienced due to the pandemic are insurmountable.

When our partners at the Character Lab talk about a “growth mindset,” they encourage students to think of the brain as a muscle that can be trained and strengthened. Angela Duckworth, founder and CEO of the Character Lab, writes that when we tell students that growth mindsets are, in fact, backed by learning science — that neurons continue to grow as students grow and learn — they are more likely to adopt a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.

While working to promote agency and growth mindset as a means of combating learning loss at scale, consider technology that fosters these skills in tandem with academic remediation and acceleration. The right technology can give learners opportunities to reflect on their growth and exercise agency while working toward mastery in those critical areas impacted by learning loss.

Listen to students

I opened this article with the idea that students know what they need socially, emotionally, and academically. However, that doesn’t mean that all students can verbalize exactly the instructional supports they need, what material they’ve missed, or the depth of the impact the pandemic has had on their lives.

However, they can, when prompted, communicate how they feel. They can describe what excites them about learning, what causes them to have anxiety in the classroom, and what’s going on at home that makes it harder to stay engaged during class. They have so much to share about what they need to be successful — a commitment to asking and listening is essential.

Surveys, touchpoints, and conversations can uncover student needs and obstacles, sometimes in a group setting and sometimes in a less intimidating one-on-one setting. It’s vital to commit to also “listening” to what students don’t say, to “hear and understand” what they show. Rich, comprehensive student data sets can help ensure that students are interacting with the right material at the right time which increases their engagement and sense of accomplishment.

Finally, consider how technology in the classroom and at home can drive personalization and enhance a teacher’s understanding of the student’s learning journey. Technology that makes performance data available to the students themselves empowers students to reflect on and discuss their learning. Tools that rapidly deliver insights on student experiences to teachers are particularly valuable — every learning output from an individual student has the potential to better inform future learning in this virtuous feedback loop!

Empower students by listening, asking, and adapting

The challenge of addressing a variety of student needs in the context of environmental stressors is not new — nor is the importance of addressing these challenges from a holistic lens of the student experience under-appreciated.

Today, we already have the capability to apply technology thoughtfully to deliver highly personalized learning pathways, collect precise data about student learning, and even capture the social, emotional, environmental, and cultural nuances of the student experience. Technology is not simply a cold information processor; rather it can enable a stronger connection between a highly empathetic educator and students with predictably personal needs.

We don’t control the external circumstances within which we ask students to commit to their own personal learning. But by the very act of asking, listening, and adapting approaches for each specific individual, the promise of technology will be to deliver a much more effective and rewarding and uniquely human learning experience.

About the Author

Sean Ryan is president of McGraw Hill’s School group, which is responsible for providing PreK—12 educators and learners with programs, tools, and services supported by differentiated pedagogical instruction and purposeful technology. He was named to his position in April 2020 after serving as CEO of Wall Family Enterprise and before that as SVP and General Manager of Fuel Education, where he was responsible for strategy, marketing, sales, implementation, support and product development for the business.

Prior to these roles, Ryan was SVP of Sales, Service & Platform at McGraw Hill, leading the School group’s sales, implementation and training organization. His long career in education includes high profile roles at Campus Management, Scantron Corporation, and The Princeton Review of Japan. Sean is also a former military intelligence officer, having served in a variety of capacities in the United States. and abroad and rising to the rank of captain.

Sean graduated with a Master of Science degree in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Master of Arts in International Relations from the University of Arizona, and a bachelor’s degree in Soviet Studies from the United States Air Force Academy.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Supporting children and families, together

2021-10-22T18:54:57+00:00

Like many parents, when the Covid pandemic began, Heather Martin was working from home and trying to create activities for her two daughters — while doing her job at the same time. She remembers her inbox filling up with online resources and curriculum during the first weeks.

“At first I thought, ‘This is amazing,’ Martin recalls. “And then about two weeks in, the mom guilt hit. I thought, there’s no way I can create these lessons and activities and work at the same time.”

Martin says the experience made her grateful to work with programs like Vroom, which don’t take extra time or money to implement. “With Vroom, parents don’t have to do anything extra. Instead, it’s about transforming what they’re already doing into a moment to learn.”

Martin is the statewide Vroom coordinator with the Child Health and Development Project: Mississippi Thrive. The joint program, from Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center and the University of Mississippi Medical Center Children’s of Mississippi, supports families, healthcare providers, and early childhood professionals in early learning to foster positive caregiver and child interactions, enhance attention to developmental milestones, and strengthen children’s brain architecture. She works with a variety of organizations and programs supporting children and families, including Vroom — a global program of the Bezos Family Foundation that offers free, science-based tips for children from birth to age 5. Parents can access the tips in an app, through the website, and through text messages as they go about their day. She’s also created new resources, including a book that uses Vroom tips to help families cope with the reality of the pandemic in everyday life.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi

In reflecting on her statewide efforts, Martin sees that Mississippi residents are connected by being part of a welcoming community.

“There’s just nothing that can beat our hospitality.” She adds that as a “high need, low-resource state,” Mississippi is also facing some specific obstacles, starting with its geography, which limits access to sharing resources.

The state is rural, and its regions are unique.

“People laugh sometimes and say there are multiple Mississippis,” Martin says. “Coastal Mississippi, the Pines, the Capital Area/River Region, and the Delta.” Martin explains that each region has its own strengths, dynamics, and challenges, making partnerships between organizations vital.

“Many of our challenges are connected to the ruralness of our state,” Martin continues. “There is no standing resource for early childhood in the community where I live. There are a lot of people, especially in the past few years, who are hurting, who have lost jobs, who are losing their homes. Our childcare centers are struggling. It is incredible to be able to provide a free resource that can give hope.”

To connect with parents across the state, Mississippi Thrive works with the Mississippi Department of Education and the Mississippi Department of Health, as well as several others to implement statewide Vroom trainings and outreach. Now, the Vroom program is included in the training of each childcare director who secures licensure for their center and a part of regular onboarding for home visitors through Healthy Families Mississippi as well.

Parents already have what it takes

Research shows that a two-generational approach to learning supports parents and caregivers in being their child’s first teacher.

“What drove me to share Vroom was our state’s children and also our families and the parents who would come to me as a former educator and say, ‘I just don’t know how to help my children.’” Martin says. “I value being able to hand them something as based in research as Vroom and say, ‘You already have what it takes. You already have what you need. It’s all right here.’”

Martin notes that reinforcing messaging from individuals rooted in a child’s community can encourage parents to take the driver’s seat in boosting their child’s brain.

“If you hear about it from your pre-K teacher, or if you hear about it from your childcare director, it’s that personal approach that makes the biggest difference,” Martin says.

Martin says there is a shift toward parents proudly taking on the role of their child’s first teacher, but that there are some misconceptions that learning has to take extra time, space, or supplies. “When we were growing up, parents would say, ‘when they get to school, they’ll learn this and that.’ It was the culture we had back then,” she says. “But I think the biggest thing is parents don’t realize how easy it can be.”

Martin recalls a quote from the Yale Child Study Center’s Dr. James Comer that has stayed with her for more than 15 years: “There is no significant learning without a significant relationship.”

“That quote means so much to me,” Martin says. “I explain to parents the significance of the relationship they have with their children. Because of that relationship, they have what it takes.”

Martin spreads the same message to educators weary from navigating teaching our youngest learners during the pandemic.

“When I meet with educators, I try to remind them what a gift they have getting to be that constant in the children’s lives … that they get to be that positive support. That makes a world of difference in our communities, our state, and our nation.”

To learn more about Vroom’s brain-building tips for everyday moments, visit Vroom.org

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

A culture of caring

2021-10-01T13:52:18+00:00

Written by Cynthia Cullen

Public schools were originally founded to help create responsible citizens. As an educator, I work to build a culture of caring that starts from the youngest grades and continues to the oldest. It isn’t enough to teach students the curriculum of any particular subject: Educators also have a key role in modeling how students can care about each other, care about their local community, and care about our world at large.

Like many American school districts, mine on Long Island offers students a range of extracurricular activities. I’ve often taught that students should give back to their communities, and it’s common that students raise money for a cause in the extracurricular clubs they belong to. But instead of magazine subscriptions or other fundraisers that ask students to sell a product, I was looking for fresh ways to engage young people on causes that matter, and found that with intentionality, educators can layer service learning throughout a school — or even district wide.

Scaling up service learning can connect students at every grade level and offer an opportunity to delve into relevant issues facing our global community. To begin, we encourage students to find a cause that resonates with them, whether it be hunger, the environment, how people are unfairly treated, or global refugee crises. Establishing a service-learning culture that connects students across grades and on global issues is possible with the support of programs like Youth Service America, Do Something, and Seattle-based Students Rebuild.

Thinking globally

To get my students thinking about service-learning, I tell my students to find at least that one thing that really makes them angry, and then do something about it. This year’s Students Rebuild World Needs Challenge highlights a range of topics that can inspire students not only to care about a global issue but to act on it.

Students Rebuild begins by encouraging young people to learn about their topic first, and then use creative expression to show their understanding of the need. They submit pieces of art, which translates into money, which then gets distributed to actual groups making actual change. Students Rebuild inspires students to do something meaningful with a global focus — without having to ask for funds through sales.

For example, in 2012, we held an event in the cafeteria for students to make papier mâché bones for the One Million Bones project, which raises awareness about humanitarian crises and supports the nonprofit CARE, whose mission is to “save lives, defeat poverty, achieve social justice, and fight for women and girls.” Through this project, 1 million handmade bones were displayed across the National Mall as a visible petition against humanitarian crises. Making the art was messy and chaotic, but our students embraced the creative method of helping others, and their efforts contributed to a donation of $500,000 to CARE’s work in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Students teaching students

Beginning in 2015, I worked with staff to explore an in-service learning opportunity to engage all of the students in our schools from kindergarten through grade 12. The enrollment in our district at the time was 8,000, so it was quite the challenge to envision and organize but well worth it. I wanted to show students that there are many ways to make a difference in their communities — locally, nationally, and globally. Since then, the Students Rebuild Challenge has turned into an annual event in my district. Over the years, we have consistently submitted 25,000 to 35,000 pieces of art, often valued at $120,000 to $160,000 in matching donations.

We train our high school students to work with elementary classrooms to present a lesson on the topic at the heart of the challenge. In the many conversations I have had with students who have participated in leading these teach-ins at the elementary level, they have been excited to go into classrooms where the younger students marvel at older students. There seems to be a special sense of awe because here is another “student” and not an adult. I remember being an elementary student and the few times “older kids” came into our classrooms to help us or lead us in something, the younger me could see the possibilities of an older me.

Adapting to COVID

The isolation we’ve experienced from the global pandemic has been profound. But it has only reinforced the importance of service learning. Although we have fewer community “service learning” opportunities in person, the problems of the world have not magically disappeared.

Students need to feel connected more than ever, and students understand that they are not powerless — they can make a difference in the lives of others regardless of their age or their socioeconomic status.

Students Rebuild’s service-learning opportunities can be shaped in different ways to accommodate challenges. In my school district, we decided to try implementing a full digital strategy for a Students Rebuild service-learning project on Changemakers. We used digital platforms to engage with the thespian club to read a series of children’s books that illustrated examples of changemakers. The high school students did a fantastic job and enjoyed reading the books aloud, and the elementary students liked the idea that older students created the videos just for them.

That caring that we try to foster through Students Rebuild can translate to a sense of civic responsibility that will carry over into adulthood. That level of lasting engagement is one of my greatest hopes for students. Whether in person or online, service-learning is an opportunity to show students that there are many opportunities to do seemingly small things that ultimately have a huge impact.

Cynthia Cullen is an educator at Half Hollow Hills High School East in Dix Hills, New York.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

The power of contribution: how giving back helps adolescents take off

2021-06-24T13:56:07+00:00

Article written by Matt Gonzales.

Although COVID-19 disrupted Jalan Drummond’s freshman year at Jackson State University, he has no complaints.

“Everything is great, actually,” he says. His sunny disposition is rooted in an earnest desire to do good in the world. In fact, his habit of giving back has likely positioned him for success as an adult.

A growing body of developmental research suggests that adolescents have a fundamental need to contribute. When that need is properly met, it drives fulfillment of other key developmental needs — chiefly autonomy, identity, and intimacy — that help prepare teens for adulthood.

A bio/premed major, Drummond grew up in the small town of Lafayette, Ala., where the median income is $18,000. Lafayette is famous as the birthplace of boxing great Joe Louis, and many students at Lafayette High School continue to view sports as a primary path to success.

“When I was in high school I’d ask people, ‘What do you want to major in at college?’” Drummond recalls. “They would say, ‘football.’”

Precious White-Jordan, a special education teacher at Lafayette High School, says the residents of the old mill town have struggled to adapt to the post-industrial economy. The jobs that supported the community for decades have mostly dried up, but some students still don’t see a need to further their education.

“We’re fighting that attitude, even though a lot of the mills are closed,” White-Jordan says.

Drummond is different: an “anomaly,” according to White-Jordan. But why? He enjoyed no special privileges growing up. He was raised by a single mother, with his grandmother pitching in when his mom was busy with work or nursing school. What influenced Drummond to pursue education with such zeal in contrast to many of his peers?

There is no pat answer to the question. But, looking at Drummond’s life more closely, key themes emerge that may help explain his maturity and drive — including his lifetime priority of contributing to his community.

‘It’s not just empathy’

UCLA psychology professor Andrew Fuligni has been studying adolescent development in the context of family relations for years. It was while working with immigrant families that he recognized the outsized role adolescents play in Latin American and Asian families, as they may take care of siblings, cook, clean, and more.

“What was striking was that this role was very important in giving these adolescents a sense of who they are,” Fuligni says. This led him to take a deeper look at the role of contribution in adolescent development.

Fuligni explains contribution as “making a difference by giving support, resources, or assistance to a social group, or helping that group accomplish a goal.” While contribution can take the shape of prosocial activities like community service projects or volunteering, it isn’t necessarily limited to them.

“It’s not just empathy,” he says. “And it’s not just helping someone in need. It’s basically doing something to affect other people.” In fact, he says if adolescents aren’t given opportunities to make positive contributions, they may fulfill the need in unproductive and even harmful ways.

“If we don’t give them developmentally positive ways to contribute, they’re going to find ways to do it,” he continued. “And those may not be conducive to their health, or to the health and safety of others.”

Appreciating the adolescent brain

While a desire to contribute isn’t unique to adolescents, Fuligni says it reaches new heights after the onset of puberty.

“Neural networks are developing during the adolescent years that are involved in contributing to others, whether it’s heightened sensitivity to social rewards or it’s thinking about others and what they need or don’t need.”

While it’s common to think of the adolescent brain as impulsive or risky, much of the brain development during those years supports exploratory learning and cognitive flexibility.

“Adolescents are really trying to figure out what it takes to have an adult role,” Fuligni says. “And they need opportunities to make a difference. But it has to be authentic. It has to be real.”

Giving adolescents opportunities to contribute can be startlingly simple. It can begin with giving them a say in what’s for dinner, or what activities will be pursued in the classroom. And contribution can extend beyond the home or classroom, from community service and extracurricular activities to employment and even team sports. To maximize the benefits of these activities, Fuligni says educators and parents should encourage adolescents to reflect on the importance of their contributions.

“That’s the kicker,” he says. “When they can think about what it meant to engage in that volunteer activity, or to help a friend who was in trouble, or help their parents cook dinner because they had to work late, it’s that kind of reflection that enables them to get the psychological goodies that come from helping others.”

A family affair

For Drummond, being a contributing member of his family was passed down from his grandmother.

“A Black grandmother in a Baptist church in the South wants to help everybody,” he says. “She was always feeding people, praying for them, doing whatever she could for them.”

Furthermore, when Drummond’s mom would come home from her nursing job, she would talk to him about the challenges her patients faced and the obstacles they’d overcome. While these conversations influence his decision to study medicine, they also triggered a desire to help others.

From his sophomore year onward, Drummond volunteered at the hospital in neighboring Opelika, Ala. He helped out at the local daycare, which was chronically understaffed. He spent time in senior care facilities, where he helped cheer up lonely residents during the holidays.

As a high school junior, Drummond learned about the Bezos Scholar Program, which selects 17 high school juniors and seniors from around the United States and Africa and empowers them to create community change projects in their home towns. He saw an opportunity to make an impact at Lafayette High School, where drop-out rates are an ongoing challenge. He enlisted White-Jordan as his educator and project advisor, and together they completed the application and mailed it off.

“We were a little hesitant, because we’re from a small, rural community,” he said. Nevertheless, Drummond and White-Jones were selected as Bezos Scholars. As a part of the year-long leadership training experience, they went on to create a transition program aimed at helping incoming freshmen successfully adjust to life in high school.

While COVID delayed their plans to launch the program in person, they created a virtual version that incoming students at Lafayette will experience next fall. Most important, the program “sparked a real conversation” about the freshman transition process at Lafayette High School.

“People are ready to jump on board,” White-Jordan says.

Meanwhile, Drummond is already thinking about other ways to lift up the town of Lafayette.

“I used to think if someone just threw a check at Lafayette High School, everything would be okay,” he says. “But now I realize that monetary donations aren’t everything. You need people who are willing to come back and put in some hard work to help people realize what success means, and how important education is.”

Certainly, creating opportunities for contribution isn’t a cure-all for the problem of adolescent motivation. But recognizing it as a fundamental need of adolescent development is an important first step, according to Fuligni.

“It won’t act as a shield from all the slings and arrows of life,” he says. “But it will be a source of fuel to keep going in the face of challenges, and to show up for the people who appreciate you and who are counting on you.”

Matt Gonzales is an Indianapolis-based writer and co-founder at Matinee Creative.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Mistakes are magic: cultivating confidence in adolescents

2021-06-10T15:03:32+00:00

Article written by Matt Gonzales.

When Sheryl Crow’s pop hit “My Favorite Mistake” rings through Tina Ahlgren’s middle school classroom, it signals to her students that something worth celebrating has just happened: Someone has made a mistake.

Playing a clip of Crow’s ode to happy accidents is just one of numerous ways the middle school teacher “normalizes mistakes” for her students. Ahlgren, a finalist for Indiana Teacher of the Year in 2015 (and a nominee again this year), spent the first 13 years of her career teaching algebra and calculus in Indianapolis public schools primarily serving families from low-income backgrounds. In 2018, she took a position at Center for Inquiry #2, a K-8 public magnet in downtown Indianapolis.

While her current students are a bit younger, Ahlgren says the need to normalize mistakes still looms large.

“Middle schoolers are absolutely terrified of being embarrassed in front of their peers,” she says. “My goal is to make my classroom a safe space to make mistakes, and learn from them, without thinking of it as an embarrassing thing.”

Ahlgren teaches advanced math, a subject where mistake-making is crucial to success. But her students’ intense fear of not getting things right in front of their peers can sometimes be a roadblock.

“For the first couple of weeks in my class, students are so afraid of being wrong,” she said. “They don’t want to look like they don’t belong there.” So when a student inevitably gets tripped up, Ahlgren goes out of her way to treat it as a sign of progress. And she takes care to do so “in a way that maintains their dignity and respect.”

That means more than offering a few friendly words of encouragement. She says building respectful relationships with students happens in the “minutiae” of everyday interactions, over a long period of time. There are no shortcuts, and it can’t be faked. “Teenagers see right through you when you’re not being real,” she says.

A matter of (mutual) respect

David Yeager, a psychology professor at the University of Texas who specializes in adolescent development, says adolescents have a heightened awareness of social and cultural cues that help them understand the world around them. He calls this hypersensitivity a “superpower,” much in the same way that language-learning is a superpower for infants and toddlers. Like most superpowers, however, it comes with a built-in vulnerability. It’s rooted in the “one-trial learning” that is typical of adolescence.

He explains that when an adolescent takes an action that produces an undesirable outcome, she will tend to avoid taking the same action again. While this helps adolescents protect their social status, it can deter them from taking the risks required to learn difficult material and concepts. The key to solving the problem, Yeager says, is foregrounding two developmental adolescent needs: belonging and agency.

In the context of adolescent development, “belonging” means to feel supported by others. “Agency” means to have autonomy and to feel respected. According to Yeager, respect is especially salient for engaging and motivating adolescent students. “Based on the developmental science, we think that respect is probably the single most important thing to convey to a young person,” he says. “Especially as they’re going through the turmoil of puberty.”

Yeager adds that teachers would be well-served by giving adolescents greater room for autonomy and self-actualization.

“Most of how we’ve structured youth and adolescence in our current society is disrespectful to young people,” Yeager says. “We basically tell them that they don’t matter. Just stay in school until you’re 22, maybe 25, and then do something that’s of consequence.”

While teachers can’t change the broader American culture, they can control what happens in their classroom. “Teachers need to focus on an environment of mutual respect, which means providing support for young people’s autonomy and the choices they make.”

Building a sense of belonging

Ahlgren has made mistakes of her own in her teaching career. For example, she “cringes” when she thinks of her first couple of years teaching at a high school where nearly all of the mostly students of color qualified for a free and reduced lunch. She says she suffered from “a savior complex” and wanted to “fix all their problems and make it all better.”

“Over the years, I realized that’s the wrong way to think about it,” she says. “The fact is, those students have really wonderful things going on in their lives that too often people don’t value. Understanding the strengths and unique value that each student brings to the classroom is the key to creating a safe and effective classroom culture.”

Velma McBride Murry agrees. A professor at Vanderbilt University who has spent the past 25 years researching the effects of racism on the lives of African-American youth, she says positive student-teacher relationships start with a teacher who creates an educational space where students genuinely feel like they belong. Giving students voices, and even allowing them to help make decisions about what happens “as a consequence of any behavior that is not necessarily upheld as optimal behavior in school,” can lead to greater trust and improved relationships between students and teachers.

McBride Murry adds teachers should listen, carefully, to what students have to say.

“They should know a lot about the students. Who they hang out with, who their friends are, what they talk about in terms of future goals. When those things align and converge, students often feel good about their teachers, and this is a way to facilitate school bonding and increase academic orientation among students.”

Embracing cultural humility

When she’s not in the classroom, Alhgren can usually be found roaming the hallways of her school. There, she’s often engaging in conversations with kindergarten, first grade, and second grade students. She’s already on a first-name basis with many of them.

“I make sure they know I see them, even when I may not have them in the classroom for another six years. The sooner they know that I notice them and that they are valuable members of our community in my eyes, the better.”

Ahlgren says she first realized the power of building strong relationships with her students while teaching at Howe High School, a majority Black high school on the eastside of Indianapolis. In contrast to many other teachers at the school, she bought a house in a neighborhood in the school district.

“I think teachers sometimes don’t want to see their kids outside of school because it can start to feel all-consuming,” she says. “But there’s something about them seeing you at the grocery store or seeing you walking down the street that really makes a difference.”

According to McBride Murry, when teachers like Ahlgren embrace and explore the communities of their students, they develop a “cultural humility” that gives them “a greater sensitivity to the lived experiences of the students.” This helps them build those mutually respectful relationships that are so critical to success in adolescent education.

As students return to the classroom next year, McBride Murry says it’s the ideal time for teachers to focus on fostering “caring, connected relationships” to facilitate positive developmental outcomes as well as academic success. “Someone caring about and believing in you matters,” she says. “It can really affect the future developmental trajectory of students and particularly during adolescence.”

Matt Gonzales is an Indianapolis-based writer and co-founder at Matinee Creative.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Forget the ‘factory’ model: reimagine schools to support engagement

2021-05-14T18:50:14+00:00

Article written by Matt Gonzales.

On April 19, Seattle student Ezra Bent woke up and did something he hadn’t done for more than a year. He went to school in real life — or “IRL,” as he put it.

It was a day of mixed emotions. One the one hand, the 15-year-old sophomore disliked being stuck at home all school year.

“Your sophomore year is a year where you really become an adult and learn how to do things on your own,” he says. Yet when the time came to get back to the classroom, his heart wasn’t in it. “I’m like, ‘I have to take a shower? Get dressed? Brush my teeth? I don’t want to do this.’” Bent says the extended isolation of the pandemic triggered a shift in his psychology. “It’s almost like it chemically changed the way I think and act,” he says. “I feel like I’m more introverted than I have been in the past.”

That same week, across town in South Seattle, middle school teacher Matt Burke also returned to the classroom for the first time in a year. Burke had been teaching his students online for eight months, but he had trouble recognizing them when they arrived for the first time in person.

“I had to ask them their names during attendance,” he says.

Burke’s experience isn’t uncommon among teachers who’ve spent most of the year teaching virtually. Although schools have used videoconferencing apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, students have often opted to keep their cameras off during class. Burke says it made it difficult to know “how engaged and focused” his students were at any given time.

Correlating strongly with motivation and achievement, student engagement is critical to education success. Research has shown that academic motivation tends to drop off during adolescence. When the pandemic led to extended virtual learning for middle- and high-schoolers, researchers suspected the decline might worsen.

Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer at the Bezos Family Foundation, wondered how students were faring during the pandemic. Having already gathered data in late 2019 on a nationally representative group of adolescents and their parents, she and her colleagues conducted a follow-up survey in August 2020 to see how students and their parents were managing. What she found was troubling: The number of students who reported being “not engaged” had doubled during the virtual learning period.

While this might suggest a crisis, Galinsky and other researchers view it as a critical opportunity. The traditional school model, they say, has proven unsuccessful at engaging most adolescents for decades. Other studies have found that 40% to 60% of high school students show signs of disengagement. As the pandemic winds down and schools continue the return to in-person learning, it’s the ideal time to redesign schools to support engagement by meeting adolescents where they are.

Getting into ‘flow’

What exactly is engagement in the context of education? Galinsky compares it to the concept of “flow,” pioneered by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It involves feeling energetic, dedicated to, and absorbed in what one is learning.

When virtual learning began, Galinsky suspected that adolescent students would struggle to find flow in an online school environment where interaction with peers and teachers is severely limited. Her preliminary research found that 69% of students she surveyed were “rarely engaged or not engaged” during online learning. Galinsky says it’s an amplification of a problem that has festered in schools for years. “School engagement among adolescents wasn’t high before the pandemic,” she says. “So, this really is an opportunity, as any disruption is, to see what can we learn to engage children in school better because it will lead to better learning.”

A good start, Galinsky says, is for schools to design curriculum and implement instructional methods that align with the developmental needs of adolescent students. For example, her study found that students who felt a sense of belonging during virtual school were more likely to be engaged. “A sense of belonging was protective against a loss of engagement,” she says. Other factors, such as teachers providing choices and meaningful work to students, also helped.

Galinsky says a lesson for schools and families is to take what worked in engaging students well in online learning and continue to do it. “Returning to the status quo won’t work,” she says. “We have to use this crisis as an opportunity to improve.”

Relationships vs. remediation

Although Bent “hated” virtual learning, he knows he’s grateful to have had the support of family. His parents — both college professors who worked from home during the pandemic — were patient with him when his performance dropped precipitously early in the school year. They gently encouraged him to push through the tedium and isolation of online school. Eventually, his grades improved.

Not every child has had the privilege of that kind of comfort and support. As recently reported in a Washington Post story, low-income and students of color have been hit especially hard. Many spent virtual school taking care of siblings instead of logging into class. Some took part-time jobs to supplement their family’s income. They are also more likely to have experienced a COVID-related life event, such as the serious illness or loss of a loved one.

For these students, lack of engagement in school has been a simple function of survival. Galinsky worries schools may be tempted to focus on “aggressive remediation” for these students when they return to school. That would be a mistake for a couple of reasons, she says. Not only would it label students who are already marginalized as “behind” their peers, but it would address a symptom and not the root of the engagement problem that has plagued schools for years. The key to supporting students, she says, starts with centering the developmental needs of adolescents: caring connections, agency, mastery, and purpose.

Seattle teacher Burke agrees. “I don’t think the goal is getting back to normal, because we know that normal is inequitable,” he says. He hopes schools will use this opportunity “to examine what we’ve learned over the last year and replace the worst effects of what was considered ‘normal.’”

Rejecting the ‘factory model’

Linda Darling-Hammond has big ideas about how schools can better engage adolescents in a post-pandemic world. A professor of education emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Darling-Hammond recently headed up the education transition team for President Biden. She agrees that now is the time to reimagine schools, starting by meeting students where they are instead of sorting them into categories.

Consider, she says, that students who were most disengaged during the pandemic are from low-income communities and communities of color. Adhering stubbornly to the traditional school model would increase academic performance disparities that exists between them and their more privileged peers. Instead, Darling-Hammond says schools actively help kids get socially and emotionally calibrated after the trauma of the pandemic. “For kids who have had overwhelming experiences, they need to process what they’ve been through and make meaning out of it,” she says.

She argues for a “supportive” school return that prioritizes warm relationships and social-emotional support. Schools that were already using a relationship-focused model before the pandemic suffered less disengagement during virtual school, she says. “Schools that are project-based, have advisory systems, and community wraparound services did better than those stuck in the old factory model.”

To those who argue that reinventing schools at scale is unrealistic, Darling-Hammond points to the past. “I came up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when a lot of change came on the heels of a disruptive time,” she says. “Plus, I see a lot of state leaders, district leaders, and teachers who are eager to figure this out. I think we have a policy environment and a social consciousness that is ready to do this.”

Plus, the stakes are too high to accept the status quo. “We’re at a moment when people see there’s a need for education that prepares kids to be engaged, thoughtful, compassionate learners,” Darling-Hammond says. “Because that’s going to make the difference, frankly, between whether we survive or not as a species.”

Matt Gonzales is an Indianapolis-based writer and co-founder at Matinee Creative.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

An important factor in instilling confidence for the return to in-person learning

2021-04-21T17:49:33+00:00

Written by Jeff Andrews, MD

As the return to in-person is under way, a common question is whether schools are ready to safely welcome back students, teachers, and staff without risking an outbreak of COVID-19. According to the CDC, there is a lower risk of person-to-person transmission of the virus if preventative measures are put in place. These strategies require coordination between schools, state departments of education, and public health divisions to set up programs that ensure ease of use, and regulated practices.

In support of creating this infrastructure, President Biden recently committed to investing more than $10 billion toward building up COVID-19 testing in schools.

In addition to ensuring physical safety, there is a desire to support mental and emotional wellbeing for students. As noted in World Medical & Health Policy, students face significant risks indicates that students face significant risks from the disruption caused by school closures, including a decline in learning, a higher likelihood of dropping out, adverse mental health issues, and other disruptions. From a holistic standpoint, COVID-19 rapid antigen testing goes beyond reassuring students and teachers who test negative and isolating those who test positive: it fast-tracks a safe return to normalcy that is needed in more ways than one.

Rapid testing is one of the five pillars of preventive measures, along with vaccination, wearing a mask, social distancing, and hand washing. In fact, articles and studies in multiple peer-reviewed publications including the New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal have explained the benefits of serial, rapid antigen testing.

Routine serial testing of students and staff enables those with negative results to resume their normal school routines and will help to identify and isolate positive cases of COVID-19 as early as possible to prevent further spread and facilitate contact tracing and testing. And because antigen tests are fast and simple to use, COVID-19 becomes easy to monitor for even the most novice tester.

One of those testing devices being used in K–12 schools, colleges, and universities across the country is the BD Veritor™ Plus System. A fully portable device, it uses a nasal swab to detect viral proteins and provide results in 15 minutes through a digital readout that eliminates human subjectivity.

Adding to its ease of use, the BD Veritor Plus System can be paired with ImageMover, a companion mobile app that enables more streamlined reporting of testing results. With ImageMover, any school using the BD Veritor Plus System can capture required demographic details of those being tested, upload COVID-19 test results, report results to appropriate stakeholders, and automate reporting to public health agencies. This enables compliance with reporting requirements and significantly reduces manual documentation.

In Delaware, for example, teams from the Delaware Department of Education, the Division of Public Health, and more than 76 charter and private schools across the state collaborated closely to implement testing using the BD Veritor Plus System. Using the BD Veritor Plus System as a major part of its mitigation strategy, these schools have enabled safe in-person learning schools since January.

Screening through serial testing allows schools, school leaders, and administrators to conduct in-person learning with confidence. Continued progress with vaccination, including young people, will also increase public health safety. For those students and teachers with special health concerns, until vaccinated, it will be necessary to continue to provide at-home teaching and learning experiences until the pandemic emergency has ended.

Dr. Jeff Andrews is the Global Medical Affairs Vice President at BD Integrated Diagnostics Solutions. To learn how BD is supporting back-to-school programs on the heels of being granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its rapid antigen test to be used for SARS-CoV-2 screening through serial testing, visit bdveritor.com.

This product has not been FDA cleared or approved; but has been authorized by FDA under an EUA for use by authorized laboratories. This product has been authorized only for the detection of proteins from SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens. This product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization is revoked sooner. For more information, please see bdveritor.com.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

How can young people find meaning?

2021-03-29T17:48:52+00:00

The following article was written by Leonetta Elaiho of Students Rebuild.

No one predicted what the past year would bring. The pandemic has impacted how students and educators learn, teach, interact, and connect. But we’ve also seen how sparking change does not require any superpowers. Students have adapted to so many changes over the last year. Contribution and overcoming adversity are not solely reserved for those of us with exceptional qualities such as heroism. We see this every day in our work with Students Rebuild, and young people like Welela Solomon are a great example.

Welela Solomon

Welela is a 16-year-old student in Seattle. When I look at Welela, I see a young person striving to find meaning, purpose, and goals. “I grew up with the ideology that we have to lift another person up and help others, even if it’s small,” she told me. “Being compassionate, being kind, and being empathetic are super important. By doing service or volunteering, it will reveal a different part of you that you may have not noticed before.”

After a trip to Ethiopia in middle school, Welela realized how medical supplies were in short supply. Returning home, she fundraised to send more than 2,000 medical and surgical gloves to Ethiopia. “With the glove project, I really got to experience that balance of being a visionary — but at the same time being super realistic,” she says.

Welela’s story is just one example of how young people thrive when they find meaning and develop passions and goals. Recent research from the Center for the Developing Adolescent affirms one of the key developmental needs of young people is to contribute — to families, peers, or their communities. With the support of educators and their communities, when young people contribute, they grow developmentally, make meaning, and find purpose.

We took those lessons to create Students Rebuild, a program of the Bezos Family Foundation, which promotes engaged, purposeful learning wherever a young person lives and goes to school.

Using our combination of art and philanthropy as a doorway to greater global understanding, Students Rebuild has brought together students and teachers from around the world for collective action. We’ve been able to develop digital learning for the past decade to focus on issues such as ocean conservation, hunger, and literacy. This year’s Changemaker Challenge honors everyday heroes making a difference in a year like none other. Students make awards, trophies, or certificates for a changemaker in their life with whatever supplies are available, including upcycled materials.

Even though we’re all more isolated right now, our growing community of more than 800 teams globally is banding together to create art for change. We’ve worked to make the process of participating simple: For each award shared with Students Rebuild, the Bezos Family Foundation will make a $5 donation — up to $1 million — to young people and educators leading change around the world.

Our team has also developed curricula, lesson plans, and other resources for educators who participate in the Challenge. Many resources are informed by national standards, and all resources are always free of charge and flexible enough for any setting. Participants learn about the power of change-making and are encouraged to take action, leading to a deepened sense of agency.

There is no handbook for change-making. Young people gain agency when they work together on a cause they care about. This might look like becoming a helper and supporting your neighbors with small acts of kindness. It might also look like stirring up “good trouble,” which civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis modelled so brilliantly for us during the course of his changemaking life.

We all have what it takes to make change, increase youth agency, and contribute to engaged communities. It’s a joy to watch young people like Welela, right where they are, find purposeful work and creatively collaborate to make the world better.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Teaching democracy as it happens

2021-03-26T15:25:18+00:00

At a time of national political discord and social upheaval, educators are faced with the daunting task of teaching remotely while simultaneously addressing major concerns about modern American society with their students. Now more than ever, providing young people with a thorough understanding of the roots and evolution of America’s history and government could not be more urgent.

The Academy for American Democracy is here to help! The Academy for American Democracy is the newest educational program at the New-York Historical Society, the oldest museum in New York. The Academy for American Democracy is a free residency program that immerses students in an intensive study of the history of democracy, beginning in ancient Athens before moving to the Founding Era of the United States and landing in the present day. This residency program is specifically designed for students in sixth to ninth grades, as those are the grades when students in the United States typically study the ancient world.

Teacher Carol S.’s students participated in the program remotely. She said, “My students knew that one of the reasons that ancient Athens was special was that it had a democracy, but the students didn’t really know what this meant. The in-depth explanation, paired with some of the ‘characters’ and ‘setting’ through various works of art, helped students to construct a mental image of where, when, and how democracy was happening. The term ‘democracy’ is also thrown around a lot, so students have heard it and think they know what it means, but it’s very superficial and they don’t have a sense of what the alternatives are. I think that through this work, students can begin to understand that democracy is a work in progress, not just a button you click on!”

Our program is designed to encourage students and educators to critically examine our complicated, collective past while seeking to build a more equitable future. We rely on inquiry-based instruction so that students

Feel empowered to share their own ideas.
Are able to sharpen their analytical skills.
Understand the value of history and civic participation.
Can continue to develop a love for learning.

In addition to rich discussion, students are able to creatively synthesize all they’ve learned through digital art-making, including podcasts, zines, songs, and poems. We believe that the intersection of art, history, and technology enhances students’ critical thinking skills and encourages innovation. By the end of the residency, students are able to draw parallels between ancient Athenian and early American democracy and the world today.

Another teacher, Alma Rodriguez, remarked, “We (students and myself) never really equated theater with activism, much less ancient Athenian theater! It gave us a new appreciation for the ancients and provided an avenue to discuss the current climate of activism and protests.”

Educators also benefit from the Academy for American Democracy through our complementary professional development workshops. In these communities they learn from Columbia University professors to explore democracy and collaborate on how to incorporate these concepts with their learners.

COVID has changed the way we teach, and schools will likely continue to navigate hybrid learning models for years to come. In an effort to offer equitable access, our free digital resources are easily accessible here to aid teachers and students in their study of democracy. Check out this example below:

Want to take part? The Academy for American Democracy is open to all students, whether in a traditional school or homeschool. To participate, students must currently be in sixth to ninth grade. Applications for the spring and summer are still open and are accepted on a rolling basis. To apply for your class or school, click here. To apply for your homeschoolers, click here. For general information about the Academy, visit us here or email us at aad@nyhistory.org.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

In this unorthodox classroom, young entrepreneurs see no limits

2021-03-19T19:22:51+00:00

Last year the classroom moved into the living room as online education became a necessary countermeasure to school closures across America. Despite the disruption, some students opted for extracurricular activities to keep busy and support their communities, including alumni of the T-Mobile Foundation’s Changemaker Challenge.

Now in its third year, the Changemaker Challenge is a nationwide contest sponsored by the T-Mobile Foundation in partnership with Ashoka, and is for young people with big ideas about how to change the world for good. Teams of youth aged 13–18 submit original projects in one of three categories: technology, education, and the environment. Though teams typically come together in the classroom, the bulk of their work is done outside regular school hours, collaborating, meeting with advisors, and dedicating their own time and effort to their chosen cause. COVID-19 forced the T-Mobile Foundation to postpone the event last year, but this year the organization adjusted to current conditions and the 2021 application period is open now through April 8, 2021.

T-Mobile and Ashoka leaders will review each submission and select the top 15 for a three-day workshop at the T-Mobile campus outside Seattle, where students will receive hands-on mentorship and peer networking opportunities (obeying CDC COVID-19 safety guidelines). Finalists will also win seed funding of up to $15,000 to supercharge their work. Many past projects have evolved into fully functioning nonprofits or social enterprises.

One such project is JEE Foods, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 by four Butler Technology Ross High School students in Hamilton, Ohio with a mission of “Student-Powered Food Rescue and Hunger Relief.”

JEE’s student volunteers have been able to transition the project into the post-pandemic world, no classroom necessary. In fact, they’ve significantly ramped up their efforts to address the skyrocketing needs of a community experiencing extreme hardship due to the economic fallout of COVID-19.

“Prior to the pandemic, we did about 20,000 pounds of food over a two-year span,” says Levi Grimm, a Butler senior and JEE Foods’ regional director. “And between the end of May of last year to where we are now, we’ve done over 2.7 million pounds of food.” That’s five semi-trucks full of food a week going out to hungry folks across the entire southwestern Ohio region.

“It definitely is a huge undertaking,” says Chloe Godbey, a junior and JEE’s donation coordinator. “But honestly, it doesn’t feel like you’re working or doing something strenuous. It just feels like you’re doing something good.”

Supporting the JEE Foods team since its inception is Tom O’Neill, an information technology instructor at Butler Tech. A self-described serial entrepreneur, O’Neill says he originally planned a brief foray out of the corporate world into teaching to “disrupt education” and had every intention of returning to private business. That was 20 years ago.

Today he still applies his unique teaching style at Butler. He runs his classroom like an office, with a business hierarchy and project-management strategy. He gives students control over the entirety of their endeavors, offering nothing more than guidance as they develop their own entrepreneurial assets.

“Students have the potential to take the entrepreneurial mindset even further than some entrepreneurs because they don’t yet know there’s a limit,” he says.

Additionally, O’Neill has his students working outside of school about 60 days a year — a rather extraordinary number — to speak at conferences, lead grant writing workshops, even present at the United Nations.

“You name it, we’ve done it,” he says. “And that’s better than sitting in the classroom any day.”

Similarly, participating in extracurricular competitions like Changemaker Challenge has brought Levi and Chloe into contact with other like-minded young people working at a larger scale, which in turn expanded the scope of their own efforts. And, Levi says, getting feedback and validation from proven professionals at companies like T-Mobile “helped us have more grit and motivation to go farther.”

Now Levi and Chloe are naturally at ease with the size of JEE and accustomed to generating their own opportunities.

“No is just a temporary barrier to yes,” Levi says. “I’m just going to find out and innovate and draw new ways around it. But on a deeper level, I started to see myself as not being a high school student — I’m a business professional in high school. I’m just going to throw in that title and go for it.”

Both Chloe and Levi acknowledge the importance of competitions like Changemaker Challenge in focusing their efforts and providing networking opportunities with other like-minded young people they otherwise wouldn’t get.

With two years left before graduation, Chloe says she and her colleagues already have the people and succession plan in place for JEE to continue operations once she moves on. She’s undecided on a college major, but working with JEE has primed her for social good, she says. “Just being able to talk to people and to interact in helping your environment is something I would like to do.”

For Levi, stepping out of the classroom and into the real world has provided a clear view of JEE’s impact on hunger in his immediate community. And recognition by executives at T-Mobile, members of Congress, and delegates of the UN has validated his choices. His experience with JEE transformed his plans for his future, which include attending college next year. Previously he was strictly business-minded and “focused on profits.”

Now, he says, “I’ve turned from profits to people for sure.”

Learn more about JEE Foods and the T-Mobile Changemaker Challenge.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

How Prepared Was the U.S. for Online Learning?

2021-02-02T16:11:51+00:00

Closed schools. Empty lecture halls. Abandoned libraries. COVID-19 has left educational facilities desolate.

The pandemic created unprecedented challenges for education systems worldwide. For many countries, providing fair and equal access to online learning on a national level has proved difficult. But how has the United States fared?

A recent study conducted by online learning platform Preply revealed that the United States ranked 12th out of 30 countries when it came to its preparedness for the national shift to digital education.

A range of factors — including access to a computer, expenditure on education, and broadband download speed — were taken into consideration in order to compare countries’ e-learning offerings and capabilities. All 30 countries included in the study are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

Some of the results may surprise you.

Research Highlights

The United States offers 9,303 online degree programs and courses that can be taken entirely online — the most of the 30 countries — with almost 78 million students enrolled. In comparison, Canada and Australia have only 1/10th of the number of students.
The United States sank to the number 12 position in part due to its lack of government spending on tertiary (higher) education per student. While the U.S. rate is 19% GDP per capita, high-ranking countries such as Denmark and Sweden make a more significant investment at 43%.
Of the group, the United States also has the second-highest average monthly cost of broadband Internet access, with New Zealand earning the top spot for most expensive.
Only 72% of students in the United States have access to a computer, compared to 95% in Norway and 98% in the Netherlands. Turkey (50%) and Mexico (44%) represent the lower end of the spectrum.
The U.S. also has moderate mobile internet speed, coming in at 44.3Mbit/s. For comparison, the best rate was 73.7Mbit/s (the Netherlands), and the worst was 18.5Mbit/s (Chile).

As the numbers demonstrate, digital education can only be as robust and accessible as the technological infrastructure in its country of use.

“We are convinced that e-learning has a great potential to improve educational opportunities worldwide,” says Kirill Bigai, CEO of Preply. “The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that access to digital education is unequally distributed, but that there are ample opportunities to begin investing in the digital infrastructure necessary for a national shift to online learning. This study uncovered the extent to which all learners have access to adequate digital tools and resources.”

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

3 ways you can save teachers time and improve instruction through connected education technology

2020-11-02T15:43:50+00:00

As schools and districts rely more on digital tools, especially with online and blended learning becoming a necessity, the importance of a smooth, streamlined experience is heightened. But when software products are fragmented and don’t communicate with each other, a teacher’s time can be wasted with labor-intensive tasks, manually entering the same data within multiple programs, or trying to pull together cohesive data from various systems.

According to Digital Promise, 74% of districts use more than 26 different education technology products and another 17% of districts use over 100. When teachers have to maneuver between so many products, it makes sense that studies show only 42% of a teacher’s workday — which averages 10 hours, 40 minutes — is spent teaching in the classroom.

Education technology interoperability — when different products communicate and share data cohesively — can streamline a teacher’s day, as well as give them more insightful data from multiple sources. In addition to fostering a healthy tech ecosystem and giving teachers a complete view of students with shared data, interoperability can make the school day more productive so teachers can focus on students.

Here are three ways you can improve a teacher’s day through a more efficient, smoother — and interoperable — experience.

1. Interoperability makes it easier to use data in the classroom.

When products connect and share student data, teachers save time when they don’t have to pull information from multiple sources manually. They get a more holistic view of the student, which results in more efficient and informed decision-making. Teachers can quickly see all information for the student or class, like grades, assessments, attendance, and more in one dashboard. The result is that they’re better prepared to make sound decisions for instruction, including personalized learning choices.

2. Interoperability makes it easier to adopt, learn and use new technology.

Adapting to change with new technology can be frustrating for teachers, and it’s not uncommon for products to go unused after a short trial period. But when products connect through interoperability, or share the same user experience or interface, it can be much easier for teachers and students to adopt, and then learn and use the products.

3. Interoperability saves teachers and students time with a simpler workflow.

A significant benefit of an interoperable system is saved time, starting with single sign-on. With one login, you can “set it and forget it,” says Jerome Ohnui, data specialist at Troy School District in New York. “Teachers and students can log onto necessary resources right away instead of waiting for manual uploads and memorizing yet another credential combination.”

It can also save tech directors and staff time and frustration when their schools are using interoperable ed tech products. “I can focus on bigger problems and fixing broken things rather than having my time eaten up by the minutiae of things that can and should be automated in the 21st Century,” says Ohnui.

But how do you know if your ed tech products are interoperable?

While many ed tech vendors claim to integrate with a wide range of products, one way to be sure is to check with the leading organizations working towards interoperability. These include Ed-Fi Alliance and IMS Global. PowerSchool has IMS Global support in several products, including PowerSchool Schoology Learning (OneRoster, LTI, Common Cartridge), Performance Matters Assessment and Analytics (LTI, QTI), and PowerSchool SIS and eSchoolPLUS (OneRoster).

The difference between a productive, positive, interoperable experience using communicative products with a shared dashboard, compared to a fragmented, frustrating, time-consuming — and ultimately unproductive — experience can be immense.

For more details and to learn if you have the right, interoperable tech tools in place, visit our in-depth blog post here.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Helping students stay safe: Indy company provides “great solution” to support schools in COVID-19 era

2020-10-08T18:53:07+00:00

How do schools meet the challenge of safely staying open? This is a hard question, particularly when children – mostly teens – now make up 10% of all U.S. COVID-19 cases, according to the Associated Press (AP). With nearly 2,400 COVID-19 cases reported in Indiana shortly after schools reopened, the Wall Street Journal rings true: “in-person learning is fragile, anxiety-ridden and complicated. Staying open is hard-fought.”

To reduce the possibility of infection at in-person schools, school officials must deliberately take steps to “minimize risk,” reports the AP.

Mt. Vernon Schools in Indiana found a unique solution to help beat the odds. When CDC guidelines for reopening first came out, many schools experienced major challenges in “trying to figure this out,” explained Dr. Jack Parker, Mt. Vernon Schools superintendent.

But when COVID-19 cases hit Mt. Vernon this fall, a tailor-made safety asset was already in place. Safely nearby the high-traffic nurse’s station, a CDC-compliant temporary quarantine room (TQR) stood ready. Produced by Hamilton Exhibits LLC in Indianapolis, the multi-purpose and easily sanitized TQR provides a private place to help protect students – reassuring parents of Mt. Vernon’s active commitment to safety and helping keep the school out of national headlines.

Why is the TQR needed? The Superintendent explains that for CDC-recommended student safety reasons, “Isolation is really important. If somebody comes to our school with a symptom of COVID-19, the first thing we do is we get them isolated.”

Some schools had resorted to shower curtains, visqueen plastic, and duct tape to fashion a temporary quarantine area. According to Dr. Parker, the TQR takes out the guesswork and fulfills this essential need, particularly around busy school nurse offices.

The result? “The Mt. Vernon Middle School has greatly benefited from the TQR being in our building,” said Benjamin Williams, principal. “The TQR is used every day and provides a safe and comfortable environment for students in need of the space.”

In addition to the TQR which Dr. Parker deems “a great solution,” Hamilton developed a full line of innovative safety products to help actively support student safety, all offered on an “at cost” basis.

These products “help take the burden off of planning for and complying with safety measures by school officials in these challenging times,” said Jason Weddle, COO of Hamilton.

A few months ago, this Indiana company was focused on crafting unique brand experiences for national high-tech brands like Rolls-Royce, Baxter Healthcare, and Cummins, Inc. Now, Hamilton provides schools in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and elsewhere with specialty Hamilton safety products.

What is the safety process? Following state and CDC directives, parents are notified to come pick up any student to exhibits COVID-19 symptoms. The student can safely await their parent or guardian inside of the TQR. The professional quality design of the TQR promotes normalization of the situation and helps reduce anxiety.

Dr. Parker and other Mt. Vernon school administrators explain how this works.

Click here for more information about the safety products.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

A hopeful perspective: As cracks in our education system are revealed, we need to dream about what’s possible

2020-09-17T13:31:27+00:00

The cracks in our education system are showing, and educators everywhere are feeling it.

In times like these, it’s perhaps temptingly easy to point fingers and allocate blame for the systemic inequities in education that are becoming more apparent by the day and our collective lack of preparedness to adapt to flexible learning models.

But with the stress of a global pandemic bearing down on everyone, it may be better to give one another grace and instead seek to foster the growth mindset we so desperately wish to instill in our students.

It might as well be the motto of 2020:

Things aren’t going quite the way that we had hoped . . . All right. Now, what can we learn from it? How can we do better in the future?

Taking a moment to dream: How can we reimagine what ‘school’ looks like?

We interviewed several innovative educators from around the country and asked them to dream about what a better system of schooling might look like. You can see some of their responses in the video below:

A common thread among responses was a desire to question the efficacy of a one-size-fits-all model of education in which all students are in the same room learning the same content at the same time.

“There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to education,” says Amy Gwizdz, a technology coach at Dearborn Public Schools. “Education is messy. All students are not created equal. Our kids are the ones who we fail when we try to impose any clear-cut, standardized, or one-size-fits-all on them.”

“As we move forward, I hope our biggest question is,” poses Tanya Leon, an English teacher at Richards Middle School, “are we doing things because it’s the way we’ve always done it? Or because it’s what’s best for kids? If we move toward that second question, I think we will realize that for a large part of the population, the traditional model doesn’t work. If we’re missing one kid, we’re missing one kid too many.”

But how exactly do we do this? How do we move away from a one-size-fits-all model to something more personalized to each student’s unique needs?

Student-centered learning as the horizon

Many educational leaders believe that the future lies in pushing toward student-centered learning models.

Of course, it’s not news to any seasoned educator that personalization matters in learning. Historically, however, the problem has been that it’s difficult to personalize learning for students at scale.

In most classrooms, there’s a ratio of one teacher per 20-30 students. Before recent advancements in technology, tailoring each student’s learning to their unique needs was near impossible.

Good teachers have always made adjustments to accommodate individual students where needed, but a truly student-centered approach to learning is exceedingly difficult to implement without access to digital tools and digital content.

To make it feasible requires significant rethinking of the traditional classroom as we understand it.

“It’s a different type of classroom. It functions differently at its core,” explains Dr. Chris Harrington, director of the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out our in-depth article that takes a deeper dive into what this classroom looks like and what it will take for us to get there at scale.

The long road ahead isn’t possible without hope

Change is rarely easy.

It’s hard work to reimagine what school looks like, especially when the traditional model of schooling is one in which most of us were raised during the formative years of our lives.

COVID-19 has been an incredibly challenging time for many. Now, more than ever, it’s important that we give one another grace. We can’t expect change to happen overnight, nor in a single summer in the midst of a global pandemic.

But we can dream of a better system and begin asking our communities to dream alongside us.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Narrative 4’s positive classroom impact

2020-09-14T14:06:37+00:00

In these complex and uncertain times, Narrative 4 knows you’re gearing up for the new academic year with both trepidation and excitement. However daunting the prospect of teaching virtually or otherwise may be, we want you to know we are here to support you and your community’s needs.

Narrative 4 is a global organization driven by artists, shaped by educators and led by students. Our core methodology, the story exchange, is designed to help students understand that their voices, stories, actions and lives matter, and that they have the power to change, rebuild and revolutionize systems.

In a story exchange, participants are paired together and each person shares a story that in some way defines them. Afterwards, participants are responsible for retelling their partner’s story in the first person.

Through the exchange of personal narratives we see the world, and ourselves, more empathically, a belief supported by the work of neuroscientists and by the experiences of story exchange participants.

N4 educators and students from Tampico, Mexico share successes from their K-12 story exchange program.

Here’s how Narrative 4 can positively impact your classroom right now!

The story exchange is a surefire way to amplify and capture the stories of your students, faculty, administrators and staff who left in March and didn’t return. Whether the stories are of hope, fear, joy or loss, the virtual story exchange ensures everyone has a voice.
Our model builds empathy and meets social emotional learning requirements without taking time away from required curricula.
Our online story exchange facilitator training is an excellent professional development opportunity to prepare staff (and students!) to facilitate safe and brave spaces for story exchanges.
Finally, Narrative 4 just completed the first major story exchange learning model anchored in “race and identity” which we plan to pilot with schools during the 2020-2021 school year.

Get to know Narrative 4 through the stories of our students, educators, artists. Then sign-up for a virtual story exchange or an Ask N4 webinar today!

For more information on bringing Narrative 4 to your school or community contact our Director of Global Programs, Lee Keylock, lee@narrative4.com.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Walgreens and WE Teachers show support for teachers this back to school

2020-09-04T15:40:58+00:00

We know that “Back-to-School” feels very different this year. While we may be in virtual learning classes, we know that our educators fulfill a much broader role than teaching. They serve as mentors, counselors, cheerleaders, protectors and more.

In recognizing the critical role these educators play in the lives of students, many of whom need our help now more than ever, Walgreens has supported WE Teachers – a program offering free tools, resources, trainings to educators across the US and Puerto Rico. The program equips educators to tackle tough conversations with their students about pandemic-informed communities, bullying, mental well-being, diversity and inclusion, poverty and youth violence.

Local Chicago educator, and WE Teachers Award recipient, Tanya Holliday who teaches at Henry O. Tanner Elementary School knows that teaching is a personal investment, that often comes with an emotional toll. Holliday appreciates the WE Teachers program for its module on creating a trauma-informed classroom. She says this approach helps her better navigate the feelings and reactions of her students, many of whom live in poverty.

“The module’s self-care advice for educators is what sets it apart,” says Holliday. “Teachers take on so much of our students’ trauma, yet don’t find time to internalize it and deal with it ourselves.”

WE Teachers ensures that every teacher in every school nationwide has access to the free educational tools and training they need to set them and their students up for future success. The programs are designed to be adaptable and highly accessible with customizable resources and virtual learning opportunities. Click here to apply for the WE Teachers Award which recognizes 1,000 teachers who go above and beyond with a $500 Walgreens gift card they can use toward classroom supplies.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Supporting students with flexible language education

2020-08-21T13:55:59+00:00

This school year is starting on a note of uncertainty. While teachers are used to preparing lesson plans, they now have to prepare for changing plans — from in-person school turning virtual, to students opting to learn from home, to “hopscotch” learning with alternating groups of students in the classroom.

It’s a time that requires everyone to be flexible, none more so than educators.

Students, too, have to adjust quickly, sometimes packing up their desks to continue learning at home, and sometimes being given the okay to report back to school for in-person instruction. None of this can be easy for them.

What makes things easier for students and educators is adaptable learning materials. And when it comes to language learning, Duolingo leads the field for reaching students wherever they are.

Duolingo is a language learning app, with short lessons in the language of your choice. (There are close to 100 courses available, including 39 for English speakers.) What makes Duolingo of special significance to educators is that all learning content is free. This means teachers can assign their students to use the app to supplement their classroom learning — and it means any student with a device and internet connection, anywhere in the world, can learn on Duolingo. Whether students are in the classroom or at home, learning doesn’t have to stop.

What sweetens the deal, especially for students, is that Duolingo is fun. Any student who’s played a game on their phone will gravitate to Duolingo’s quick, bite-sized lessons, where they can earn points and even climb leaderboards based on their weekly learning totals. Duolingo’s “da-ding” noises for correct answers and completed lessons make practicing Spanish a confidence boost — and arguably as fun as playing video games.

Additional learning materials from Duolingo include listening and reading practice through short stories featuring a cast of lovable, diverse characters (a purple-haired teenager is a fan favorite); podcasts, featuring true-life tales told in the language being learned, with narration in the listener’s own language for context; and at-home learning resources for parents.

Beyond these core features, Duolingo is a versatile tool for language learning: students can select which lessons to practice, go deeper into certain areas like people or fashion, and choose the number of lessons they complete in a day. But be warned: they might not want to stop learning.

And in a year featuring so much stop and go, a learning tool that kids don’t want to — and don’t have to — put away as plans change is a win for everyone.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

An identity crisis for teachers: What does it mean to be a teacher in the era of remote learning?

2020-08-18T20:22:00+00:00

The abrupt shift to remote learning this past spring left many teachers with a crisis of professional identity, with questions like:

What does it mean to be a teacher when I’m interacting with my students behind a screen?
If I use online content created by someone else, how do I show my expertise?
What is my day-to-day life as a teacher supposed to look like now?

To better understand the challenges associated with “emergency remote learning,” Michigan Virtual and Sundberg-Ferar conducted in-depth interviews with educators, students, and parents about their experiences and published the findings in a qualitative research report.

“I’m not interested in teaching this way,” remarked one teacher during these interviews. “I got into education for human interaction. That’s been ripped away.”

Another teacher lamented that the 100% remote experience felt like switching from “teaching in 3D” to “teaching in 2D” and had “lost the spirit of the classroom.”

These statements reflect the collective grief teachers felt during this time. They are valid responses to a near-overnight change in daily life with little time to prepare and little choice in the matter.

But remote learning doesn’t have to feel this way.

When done well, online learning should go beyond merely replicating the structure of the face-to-face classroom in a Zoom room. Research shows that there are key differences between effective online teaching and face-to-face teaching.

Ideally, during asynchronous remote learning with content, lessons, and assessments already created, teachers are freed up to focus their efforts on providing students individualized feedback and helping them form personal connections to the subject matter. This is where learning takes place. Teachers act as learning coaches, teaching students how to learn while guiding them through the content.

With time and training, many online teachers are surprised by the depth and quality of relationships they are able to develop in the virtual classroom. It may seem strange at first, but this format can actually allow them to give students more 1:1 attention. For quieter students, participating in class discussions and expressing their struggles may be easier in a digital environment than in a large group setting.

In the video below, Michigan Virtual’s lead science instructor, Jaci Hartman, discusses what this individualized instruction looks like in her online classroom:

As many schools begin the school year 100% remote, teachers deserve the support they need to do their jobs well in this new environment.

Rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by expecting the remote learning to be a digital analog of the brick-and-mortar classroom, schools ought to play to the strengths of this platform and give our teachers the freedom and training to leverage their talents to reach students in the most effective way possible.

To learn more about best practices for remote teaching, read the Teacher Guide to Online Learning or explore this interactive Teacher Self-Assessment Tool & Personalized PD Playlist Generator.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

Narrative 4, building connections and community

2020-08-04T20:41:03+00:00

Educators around the world are wondering what their classrooms will look like come fall. Given the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, many school districts plan to offer at least a portion of daily instruction online.

How can administrators promote a positive school climate while social distancing? How can teachers build community and civic engagement from their home computers? How can you create space for conversations about complex issues in your school or community? The answer is Narrative 4.

Narrative 4 student ambassadors from Kentucky and New York smile after sharing stories.

Narrative 4 is currently working with school districts to help them promote authentic social-emotional learning opportunities, enhance the global classroom experience, and create more empathetic communities through our unique story exchange methodology.

Hazel Joseph-Roseboro, Principal of University Heights High School in the Bronx, New York, explained the impact Narrative 4 has had in her school, “When students listen to others, have empathy for each other, and think critically, they’re going to go on to impact the world. I think that if we really worked with Narrative 4, and had it in more schools and more communities, the level of empathy, the level of discourse would go up.”

Lauren, a student ambassador from Floyd Central High School in Langley, Kentucky said of her Narrative 4 experience, “If you had asked me what was possible in this world a year ago, I probably would have been like, ‘Well, nothing’s possible because this world is in shambles.’ Since I’ve been introduced to Narrative 4, there’s literally nothing I can think of right now that I think is impossible.”

A recent survey by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence found that schools using the story exchange have better school and classroom climates. According to the survey, students in N4 schools are less likely to feel negative emotions and more likely to feel positive emotions in school.

If you’re looking to build connections in your school or want to capture community narratives in these unprecedented times, Narrative 4’s story exchange is for you! You can connect your class with students from around the world and hear stories from communities beyond your own.

We have virtual story exchanges happening in the United States, Ireland, Nigeria, Colombia, Mexico, Canada and more. Sign up for a virtual story exchange at narrative4.com/live.

Chalkbeat’s editorial staff had no role in writing or preparing this paid content. Learn about our sponsored content policy.

VIDEO: Chalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green on COVID-19 and the future of education journalism

2020-05-05T00:35:21+00:00

Chalkbeat and nonprofits across the world are participating May 5 in Giving Tuesday Now, a global day of giving. We hope to raise $15,000 to help fuel our reporting on schools. Now more than ever, we need local news.

In the video, Chalkbeat cofounder & CEO Elizabeth Green highlights Chalkbeat’s work since the COVID-19 outbreak began, and explains how our reporting will impact what happens next in public school systems.

“We can let school be recreated, budgets rewritten in the dark without community input, or we can decide together to shine a light.” —Chalkbeat cofounder & CEO Elizabeth Green

We could not do any of this without you, and we will need your continued support to keep going. Your donation today will be doubled immediately, thanks to our Board of Directors.

Please consider making a donation here to support our work. Your help ensures that we can continue to tell the story of public schools across the country.

With gratitude,

Kary Perez and the Chalkbeat team