Teaching students who have lost parents or grandparents to the pandemic

A startling number was released in a new study published in the Oct. 7 issue of the journal Pediatrics: At least 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary or secondary caregiver – either a parent or a grandparent – to COVID-19 between April 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021. And today, a little more than ...

How will pandemic ‘learning loss’ affect your classroom this fall?

Depending on where you teach, your recent school year was a combination of pandemic closings, virtual classes, and in-person teaching with masks and social distancing. Physical classrooms had fewer students; in-person attended on different days of the week; teachers had to manage students who had varying levels of available technology ...

8 smart resources for teaching online during COVID-19

Distance learning. It even sounds remote, doesn’t it? It’s teaching without all the interpersonal aspects – seeing your classroom full of eager faces; understanding your students enough to know when someone is confused; enjoying the physical aspects of moving around the room interacting with individuals, doing what you ...

Nearly 5 years into ESSA, where does student assessment stand?

At the end of 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law, building on and replacing the outdated No Child Left Behind Act. Both acts had, as a centerpiece, the need to close the “achievement gap” between poor and minority students and their peers. ESSA took ...

Fixed mindset or growth mindset: Which is your classroom?

Children are observed and "graded" from the time they’re born: She learned her alphabet at age 2; he has math aptitude. Or the opposite: She has trouble with numbers; he struggles with reading. Here’s the question: If you are one of those students, do you learn to believe those ...

Future of the Classroom report: Thinking, connecting, innovating

To research the current state of K-12 education, to do it globally, and to create a thoughtful and fact-based prediction of what the future holds would take a lot of resources. But if there’s one thing Google has plenty of, it’s resources. And they put some of ...

Mindfulness in the classroom: Does it work?

The teacher writes numbers on the white board in front of the class, preparing a lesson on fractions and decimals. Two girls are passing notes. A couple of kids in the back row are laughing about a secret joke. Several students have lost focus entirely, distracted by the windows, the ...

Why and How to Create a Makerspace in Your School

Think about the elementary school library of your childhood: shelves, books, table, and a librarian who focused a lot of her time keeping kids quiet! Now, imagine if a corner of that library had been set up for the best of exploration, tinkering and discovery by you and your classmates. ...

First-year teacher? 7 tips from the veterans

(Photo credit: Monkey Business Images, via iStock)
  Articles aimed at new teachers can sometimes seem ominous: Those are all real titles of articles aimed at teachers who will be walking into their own classroom for the first time this fall. Daunting, aren’t they? “Overwhelming is the ...