EdSurge Articles

How I Became Invisible as a Teacher of Color in the Classroom

Gene Fashaw — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

It is the weekend before my students arrive for the new school year. I am in my classroom listening to Lofi beats, pondering what has been and what is to come. All around my room are reminders of my identity as a 6’2, 280-pound Black and Puerto Rican man, husband, father, math teacher and basketball coach. I have come to find solace here; yes, these are part of my identity, which I hold dear to my heart — but as I have grown older, I have learned that few people ever see beyond them, including those who I call colleagues and peers in this education system.

In these moments, I frequently return to my favorite book, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. The novel’s exploration of invisibility, identity and the struggle for recognition resonates deeply with my experiences in education. Much like Ellison’s protagonist, I feel I have only been viewed as other people's definition of who I am supposed to be. When my students arrive, I feel I am expected to perform certain duties outside my job description simply because of my identity. My ability as a leader is hardly recognized. The struggles of being a husband and father are ignored. My existence as a person feels like an afterthought. These are the challenges I’ve faced. I want to feel seen for the many contributions I make in my classroom, school and community. This work is not easy, and feeling invisible at the same time is exhausting.

Ellison’s “Invisible Man” resonates deeply with my experiences and those of many teachers of color face in education. The novel’s themes of invisibility and identity crisis mirror the struggles I have faced in a system that frequently fails to properly acknowledge my presence and contributions. I hope that making my story of invisibility visible to those who may understand my struggle will help fellow educators of color feel seen, heard, valued, and, more importantly, retained in the classroom.

Who Am I in Education?

My career in teaching began in the fall of 2017, right after I completed the first summer semester of my graduate program. Soon after, I began my first summer professional development at a school in the neighborhood I grew up in. One of the first things I noticed was that all the students had to abide by a strict uniform policy, including shoes, belts and school colors, and middle school-aged children were walking in straight lines through silent hallways. I don’t remember middle school ever being like this, and the fact that it was mostly students of color gave me pause.

After my first three months as a teaching resident, the master teacher I shadowed went on maternity leave and never returned. Our principal also left a couple of months into the year, which prompted a takeover by central office leadership — all of whom were unfamiliar white faces in a school full of Black and Latino children. Before I knew it, I was teaching a seventh grade math class with little support on a tiny salary and barely any teaching experience.

Needless to say, I was not prepared for the unrealized stress. I quickly learned that teachers needed to play many different roles, wear numerous hats and complete far too many additional duties. I would be pulled from teaching almost routinely to address students with whom leadership in the building could not reach; that is when I earned the nickname child whisperer. Instead of a badge of honor, it felt like another invisible tax associated with being a Black teacher. It felt like my value was dependent on my ability to maintain order. From fist fights to classroom struggles, I felt limited and held within a box of preconceived notions about my role as the enforcer of system norms, the very things I despise about discipline-first school systems. It was as though I was a puppet and Geppetto at the same time. I felt like I was upholding a lie, having my students believe this is how things should be. I questioned my place inside the school, wondering what role I was really playing in students' lives.

I pressed on, hoping to still unlock our children's brilliance. Still, the beginning of my teaching career indicated that sometimes you need more than hope to make it in this profession as a person of color and education leader.

The Journey to Inspire Change

In the last five years of my career, the pandemic put a spotlight on the needs of our schools, teachers and students as conversations around what and how our children deserve to learn became divisive and critical race theory, and DEI became the debates of the time. Motivated to change this conversation and influence policy at the state and local levels, I ran for school board in 2021. It seemed like a great opportunity to try and create true change for our children while also creating an identity for myself in education that didn’t just center on how I enforce school policy for children who look like me.

Before I decided to run, I spoke with a few close advisors and the amount of immediate support was validating; however, I quickly learned that politics are not for the faint of heart. Narratives about my values and who I was were being established by everyone else. I was being accused of becoming Puerto Rican for the sake of the campaign, completely ignoring my upbringing and familial ties. The feeling I had when my wife was cropped out of an advertisement outside my campaign was infuriating. The lies about my allegiances and intentions were draining. It did not take very long for me to feel like I was just a name and face — and everyone created their idea of who I was behind it.

The campaign became draining for my family and tested the values that I chose to uphold and run on. Still, I hoped that being the only teacher on the ballot and having a commitment to my community through service would push me to victory, regardless. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and I would lose the race by a very slim margin.

A crushing defeat in many ways that made me feel like a failure. Watching others — white men, in particular — get the same opportunity after achieving less than me made me not only question my ability but also further reinforced the role the system wants me to uphold. At that moment, it all made sense. People see me how they want to see me. They prefer to keep me in a box. So, I choose to stay in the box that I’m most comfortable in —my classroom.

Making Peace with Reality

It is here in my classroom that I contemplate how to fight against a system that upholds injustice, a system that fights against the brilliance of diversity. This system does not allow everyone a seat at the table.

Nearly a decade in education, and I still wonder if I’ve truly existed. Does anyone see past my physical appearance? Do my titles of husband, father, teacher or coach even matter? Have I left an impact on anyone or anything? Am I invisible? I just maybe, and over the years, I’ve become ok with that feeling of invisibility.

Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, I may have been “looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.” It took me a long time and a painful adjustment of my expectations to realize that I am nobody but myself.

I do not need your eyes in order to be seen, and I do not need your validation to continue fighting for what I believe. I am everything and nothing of what you think I am, and I will move as I see fit.

What Can AI Chatbots Teach Us About How Humans Learn?

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:29:28 -0700

Do new AI tools like ChatGPT actually understand language the same way that humans do?

It turns out that even the inventors of these new large language models are debating that very question — and the answer will have huge implications for education and for all aspects of society if this technology can get to a point where it achieves what is known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.

A new book by one of those AI pioneers digs into the origins of ChatGPT and the intersection of research on how the brain works and building new large language models for AI. It’s called “ChatGPT and the Future of AI,” and the author is Terrence Sejnowski, a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-directs the Institute for Neural Computation and the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is also the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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Sejnowski started out as a physicist working on the origins of black holes, but early in his career he says he realized that it would be decades before new instruments could be built that could adequately measure the kinds of gravitational waves he was studying. So he switched to neuroscience, hoping to “pop the hood” on the human brain to better understand how it works.

“It seemed to me that the brain was just as mysterious as the cosmos,” he tells EdSurge. “And the advantage is you can do experiments in your own lab, and you don’t have to have a satellite.”

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,”

— Terrence Sejnowski

For decades, Sejnowski has focused on applying findings from brain science to building computer models, working closely at times with the two researchers who just won the Nobel Prize this year for their work on AI, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

These days, computing power and algorithms have advanced to the level where neuroscience and AI are helping to inform each other, and even challenge our traditional understanding of what thinking is all about, he says.

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,” says Sejnowski. “We use the word, and we think we understand what it means, but we don't know how the brain understands something. We can record from neurons, but that doesn't really tell you how it functions and what’s really going on when you’re thinking.”

He says that new chatbots have the potential to revolutionize learning if they can deliver on the promise of being personal tutors to students. One drawback of the current approach, he says, is that LLMs focus on only one aspect of how the human brain organizes information, whereas “there are a hundred brain parts that are left out that are important for survival, autonomy for being able to maintain activity and awareness.” And it’s possible that those other parts of what makes us human may need to be simulated as well for something like tutoring to be most effective, he suggests.

The researcher warns that there are likely to be negative unintended consequences to ChatGPT and other technologies, just as social media led to the rise of misinformation and other challenges. He says there will need to be regulation, but that “we won't really know what to regulate until it really is out there and it's being used and we see what the impact is, how it's used.”

But he predicts that soon most of us will no longer use keyboards to interact with computers, instead using voice commands to have dialogues with all kinds of devices in our lives. “You’ll be able to go into your car and talk to the car and say, ‘How are you feeling today?’ [and it might say,] ‘Well, we're running low on gas.’ Oh, OK, where's the nearest gas station? Here, let me take you there.”

Listen to our conversation with Sejnowski on this week’s EdSurge Podcast, where he describes research to more fully simulate human brains. He also talks about his previous project in education, a free online course he co-teaches called “Learning How to Learn,” which is one of the most popular courses ever made, with more than 4 million students signed up over the past 10 years.

What the Boom in Kids’ Smartwatches Reveals About Modern Parenting

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 02:55:00 -0700

As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.

This story also appeared in WIRED.

“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”

When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.

“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”

She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.

She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.

Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.

Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.

Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”

And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.

[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.

— Kris Perry

“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”

Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.

Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.

“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”

Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.

In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.

The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.

T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.

Today’s tools make such tracking possible.

“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”

This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.

It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.

— Mitch Prinstein

Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.

“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.

“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”

Technology ‘Training Wheels’

When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.

It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.

“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”

Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.

Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.

Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.

A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.

Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.

— Girard Kelly

“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”

To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.

“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”

Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.

“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”

As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.

“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”

That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.

“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.

Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”

“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.

What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.

Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.

“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.

To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.

‘Better Be Safe Than Sorry’

When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.

“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”

She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.

“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.

The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.

The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.

Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.

Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.

Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”

Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.

His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.

Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.

“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”

It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.

Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.

“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”

But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.

Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.

Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.

“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.

Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, by a number of measures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)

“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”

It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.

Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.

“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”

Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.

I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.

— Katie Joseph

“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”

Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.

If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.

“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”

Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.

“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.

Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.

One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.

“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”

The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.

‘Opening Pandora’s Box’

Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.

Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.

“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”

Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.

Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.

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“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)

The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.

“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.

True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.

Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.

“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.

Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.

They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.

— Katie Joseph

“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”

She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.

Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.

For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.

Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.

He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.

“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”

Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?

Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.

That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.

“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”

Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?

The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”

What Federal Data Tells Us About Challenges Finding Teachers

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.

The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.

NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.

While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.

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Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.

The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.

“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”

Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.

Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.

“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”

She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.

Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.

“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.

College ‘Deserts’ Disproportionately Deter Black and Hispanic Students from Higher Ed

Jeffrey R. Young — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.

The study, which looked at a rich set of high school and college data in Texas, found that Black and Hispanic students and those in low-income families who lived more than 30 miles from a public two-year college were significantly less likely to attend college. But white and Asian students in those same communities were slightly more likely than other students in the state to complete four-year degrees, meaning that the lack of a nearby two-year option seemed to increase the likelihood of moving away to attend college.

“While all students who live in a community college desert are less likely to complete an associate’s degree, their alternative enrollment and degree completion outcomes vary sharply by race-ethnicity and [socioeconomic status],” the study finds. In other words, for low-income and underrepresented minority groups, living near a community college can be a crucial way to gain access to any higher education. Meanwhile, such proximity might lead students in other groups to attend two-year college rather than pursue a four-year degree.

The results are particularly important at a time when more colleges are struggling to remain open, says Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio and one of the researchers who worked on the new study.

“If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help.

— Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio

“If a public institution in particular, let's say a public community college, is thinking about closing, or is thinking about merging, or is thinking about opening a new campus or consolidating campuses,” she says, “they should be mindful about who the students are that live near those different campuses.”

The researchers also suggest that colleges should consider providing transportation options or credits to students living in college deserts. “If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help, Acton notes.

Novel Finding

Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those in other groups to live in a college desert, according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the effects of college location on educational attainment, back in 2016.

In an interview with EdSurge, Hillman says that the implications of Acton’s new study are “really interesting,” adding that it is probably the largest quantitative study to take on the question of how college deserts affect different groups differently.

“It makes clear that, ‘Wait a minute, distance is different for different groups of students,’” Hillman says.

One takeaway for Hillman is the importance of making the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year institutions more frictionless, so that students who live near two-year colleges who are more likely to start there have ample opportunity to go on to get a four-year degree.

Hillman says that he began looking at geography out of frustration with an emphasis during the Obama administration on providing consumer information about higher education as a solution to college access. For instance, one major initiative started during that time was the College Scorecard, which provides information on college options based on various government datasets.

“The dominant narrative was, ‘If students just have better info about where to go to college, more would go,’” he says. “I said, ‘This is bananas. This is not how it works.’”

He grew up in northern Indiana, where the nearest college is 40 miles away. For people he knew there, information about college was not what was keeping them from enrolling. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not going to be spending all this money on gas to go to college,” he says.

SEL Can Thrive in Schools, But We Need Time to Discuss What Matters Most

Lauren Snelling — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a primary focus in many school’s strategic plans. Fortunately, there is a long list of literature, articles and research that outline the importance of SEL and the positive impact that it can have on student development. Knowing this, teachers try to fit these lessons into their morning meetings, projects, special classes, birthday celebrations, snack times and lunch hours. They are attempting to adapt to both learn about and create space for SEL, but SEL requires more time and consistency, with a heavy emphasis on time.

As an early childhood counselor and educator, I work with children in their beginning years of development and the families that care for them. Knowing that SEL is valuable and requires dedicated time, my school has taken the approach of allowing me and my colleagues to stay with the same caseload of children for five years, which is a rare opportunity for counselors and educators to have in this field. During this time, it takes students about two years to understand my role as a “feelings teacher.” They go from asking me, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” to telling me about their feelings the moment I step into their classroom. By the time they are in kindergarten, they are fully accustomed to my presence. Some of them introduce me to caregivers I have yet to meet, while others greet me with a hug as they enter the building on their own or hand in hand with friends. They have grown physically, but also emotionally as they are able to notice and deal with their emotions more readily.

As I’ve built these foundational skills with my students, my school has also given me enough time to build an expectation that students discuss their identities as a valuable component within the SEL curriculum. My teachers and administrators understand that this is imperative to the work that I do in creating systemic change and in building relationships with my students where they can feel comfortable discussing identity in an authentic, holistic and vulnerable way. The time I have been given to incorporate identity into SEL has allowed me to explore, experiment, and, most importantly, give my students new tools to navigate the world and their identities and grow and mature in their learning.

Bringing Identity to the Forefront

In her book “Unearthing Joy,” author Gholdy Muhammad speaks on the importance and impact of taking the time to get to know your students deeply. Specifically, Muhammad says, “It is important to get to know children in authentic, loving, and meaningful ways so that you learn who they are, who they’re not, and who they are destined to become on this earth.” I have learned that it is important to center identity as I learn more about my students. Acknowledging and affirming their identities creates opportunities to teach SEL on a deeper and more impactful level.

Although I work in a predominantly white institution, I work to focus on uplifting each child’s experience in the world while simultaneously acknowledging the role of prejudice, racism and oppression in our schools. My experiences over the years, when I have had the time to work with and collaborate with a diverse group of teachers, have taught me that teaching SEL without discussing these topics is often the easier and quicker route to take, but it also creates more opportunities for harm. Instead of settling for this, I challenge myself and my colleagues to lean into discomfort and expand our understanding of SEL. In doing so, I find joy in the incremental and marginal change we have created within our school because it creates an opportunity for continued growth.

As I enter first grade with my students, I notice that as much as I have learned about them, they have learned about me. They expect to hear my jokes and know that as a Black woman, my hair will look different almost every time they see me. We have developed a consistent and trusting relationship where they are holistically seen and valued, and it shows in their engagement with SEL lessons and their ability to problem-solve and express themselves.

One day, during our fourth year together, I was preparing to read the book "What Do You Do With a Problem?” for my SEL lesson, and I began by asking, “What problems do you see in your world?” Students began speaking about gun violence, robberies and people being treated unfairly. When one student spoke, another would add to their idea and tell the story from their perspective. Students also spoke about their families in India, experiencing harm and the effects of racism in America.

One child expressed grave concern that “Black and white people would always fight.” This became a focus of the conversation for a while until one of my students noted that the injustices Asian Americans experience are rarely discussed. He challenged me directly, telling me that we don’t talk about these things enough. Instead of reacting negatively or quickly moving on as we ran well over time, I listened, made time and space for the student to discuss his experience, and respectfully validated him as this conversation continued. I was unprepared for this conversation and looked to my teacher colleagues for help; they stayed present for the conversation, which went on for 45 minutes. We never even read the book.

The True Power of SEL

As I left that conversation, I felt many emotions. Mainly, I was proud of them for being capable of a conversation that was so dynamic and important. Using their self-advocacy skills, they were able to speak up and challenge me, centering experiences that matter the most to them and their families. In learning their personalities over the years, I created a safe space where they knew their voices would be heard, valued and amplified. I could get to know my students for who they are as individuals, and they understood that not only did I know them, but I also had a relationship with their teachers, which created a village of care they could lean on when needed.

Giving SEL the time and space it deserves allows children to become more self-aware and connected to their peers and adults in the school setting. This feeling of safety allows for learning environments that encourage challenging and expansive conversations and community building that values and respects the identity of all students. Doing this while also building consistent and real relationships with students creates the foundation for a uniquely safe educational environment. It creates opportunities for students to learn to be better citizens to one another. When our students are regulated, able to think critically, and encouraged to speak up about the things that are important to them, educators can better navigate students' concerns while honoring the identities and feelings that come along with them.

SEL is and should always be a part of our work as educators. However, to have a positive and lasting effect on our students' lives and relationships, we must create environments where more purposeful and intentional time is dedicated to SEL and understanding the role of identity.

Leaders Asked for More Tutors, and Schools Got Them. Is That Enough?

Daniel Mollenkamp — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:04:31 -0700

Coming out of the pandemic, students had a hard time returning to in-person classes, and they found themselves struggling to tread water academically as declining test scores made many in the country worry that students were drowning.

For school districts desperate to find a life vest for students, one response was to rely on tutoring services. These services — particularly high-dose tutoring, an evidence-backed form of small group, intensive tutoring — had been identified as a way to fight against declining student performance. But at first, in the rush to jump-start tutoring programs, schools plunked federal relief dollars down on less-researched tutoring models and created a cash-grab for companies in the tutoring space. Since then, educators have reputedly gotten more sophisticated when evaluating tutoring programs, focusing their attention on evidence-backed options like high-dose services.

Yet, it’s also unclear that the ample spending of federal funds on tutors has effectively countered learning declines. Plus, schools have had to turn to alternative funding sources to pay for tutors as relief funding fizzles out. Some programs, for instance, have started creatively using federal work placement dollars to grow their tutoring forces, even conscripting college students in the hopes that it would both bolster the outcomes for K-12 students and create the next generation of teachers from today’s college cohort at the same time.

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Some hoped that presidential involvement would help. During the 2022 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called for hundreds of thousands of new tutors, coaches and mentors for programs around the country. And seemingly, this use of the bully pulpit was a success. Now, two years later, an analysis from Johns Hopkins and the RAND Corporation suggests that schools and organizations around the country have surpassed that goal a year early. The Biden plea asked for an additional 250,000 tutors by the summer of 2025. In all, around 323,000 new tutors, mentors or coaches have already joined.

At an event for the White House this month — only weeks before an election where education has seemed a relatively quiet campaign issue — the administration pitched it as a coup for their “laser-focus” on student success. Student support organizations also took it as an encouraging sign for students. “The surpassing of President Biden’s call is a clear indicator of the strength of the American spirit and our collective dedication to the future of our youth,” said Michael D. Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, one of the organizations involved, in a written statement.

Those volunteers will provide extra muscle for districts trying to support students. But given slumping test scores and vanishing federal relief dollars, is a surge in volunteers enough to stabilize learning?

A Small Victory?

The administration was able to steer a lot of volunteers to tutoring organizations, says Antonio Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education, a nonprofit organization focused on high-dose tutoring. It’s a big part of meeting the urgent need of schools post-pandemic and it’s encouraging, he adds.

But what have been the outcomes?

The Johns Hopkins report notes that 12,700 schools increased high-intensity tutoring, suggesting that the administration’s plea helped. Thousands of schools also reported an increase in other support for students. What’s more, 34 percent of principals surveyed reported that more students had access to tutoring in 2023-2024 than in the previous year. Relatedly, 24 percent reported that more students had access to mentors.

But how much of a dent does that actually make in the country? It’s hard to say, according to Gutierrez. But there has been recent evidence concerning “high-impact” tutoring in general, which he thinks might speak to how useful this approach could be for supporting students.

For instance: Preliminary findings from the University of Chicago “Personalized Learning Initiative,” meant to stimulate attempts to expand tutoring in the country, found that high-dose tutoring is effective. According to the study, which inspected a couple thousand K-12 students in Chicago and Fulton County, these tutoring programs inspired gains in math learning. The study was meant to assess how effective tutoring programs are when schools design them on their own, in Gutierrez’s summary. Gutierrez’s organization, Saga Education, has tried to support schools in those efforts by spelling out the best practices districts should follow. The study also found that making sure tutoring occurs during the school day, rather than “on demand” after school or on weekends, was important for getting large increases in student performance.

But there are reasons to slightly tamper that enthusiasm. A meta-analysis from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute looked at 265 randomized controlled trials and found that as tutoring programs get larger, they get notably less effective. While they still helped lift student learning, the benefits of tutoring appeared smaller in large-scale programs, according to this study. To Gutierrez, who notes that the study still noted a positive effect, that’s not really surprising. In other words, because schools are experimenting with these programs themselves, how well any particular program boosts student achievement will vary.

For the movement to make personalized learning a permanent feature of American education, there have been other developments as well.

The most flashy has been AI. This year, the Los Angeles School District, the second largest in the country, launched a high-profile $6 million chatbot called “Ed,” a talking sun that was supposed to boost personalized instruction. But the company behind that chatbot collapsed this summer, raising concerns about what would happen to the student data it collected. Some have suggested the project had been simply too ambitious, and the company has become a cautionary tale.

That’s a good example of what not to do with these programs, according to observers like Gutierrez. But more promising, he says, are efforts like Khanmigo, the personalized instruction tool from Sal Khan, and other chat-based tutoring programs. Those sorts of chatbots should be developed because they could add value, Gutierrez says.

They likely won’t replace human tutors, Gutierrez says. Because of how students learn, tutoring is highly reliant on the relationship between tutor and student, he adds. That’s how tutors can nudge students in the right direction, pushing them to learn. Still, these tech products hold the promise of translating into any language and also fine-tuning to a district’s needs, though there are questions about engagement from students with these tools, he says. But so long as districts don’t depend entirely on these technologies for personalized instruction, it’s probably useful to explore how human and bot tutors can work together to assist students, Gutierrez says.

Ultimately, the drove of tutors from the Biden-Harris administration push was a step in the right direction, but there’s a lot more work ahead, Gutierrez admits.

How Are School Smartphone Bans Going?

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:46:06 -0700

Angela Fleck says this was the typical scene last year in the sixth grade social studies classes she teaches at Glover Middle School in Spokane, Washington: Nearly every student had a smartphone, and many of them would regularly sneak glances at the devices, which they kept tucked behind a book or just under their desks.

“They're pretty sneaky, so you wouldn't always know that that was the reason,” says Fleck. “But over time, I'd realize no matter how engaging my lesson was, when it was time to turn and do the group activity or the assignment — something that wasn't totally me directing the class — there would be a large number of students that had no idea what we were doing.”

What students were doing with their phones, she says, was most often using Snapchat or other social media or texting with students in other classrooms, which she described as creating drama: “And then it would just spread rapid-fire, whatever the situation was, and it would sometimes result in altercations — meeting up at a certain place, and they'd arrange it all day on the phone.”

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This year, though, the vibe has changed. Spokane Public Schools issued a new districtwide policy that bans the use of smartphones or smartwatches in classrooms during instructional time. So now students in elementary and middle schools have to keep devices off and put away during the school day, though high school students can use their smartphones or watches between classes and at lunch.

Now, she says, she feels like she has most students’ attention during classes since she no longer has to compete with buzzing devices. “In general, students are ready to learn,” she says. “As a teacher, I need to make sure that I have an engaging lesson that will keep their attention and help them to learn and help them to continue to want to be engaged.” And she says there are fewer fights at the school, too.

The district is one of many across the country that have instituted new smartphone bans this year, in the name of increasing student engagement and counteracting the negative effects that social media has on youth mental health. And at least four states — Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida — have enacted statewide bans limiting school smartphone access.

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we set out to get a sense of how the bans are going. To do that, we talked with Fleck, as well as a high school teacher in Indiana, where a new statewide law bans smartphones and other wireless devices in schools during instructional time.

Fleck is a fan of the ban, and says she hopes the school never goes back to the old approach. But she admits that she misses some aspects of having phones available to integrate in a lesson when needed.

In the past, for instance, she allowed students to take pictures with their phones of the slides she was showing. And she would often designate a student as a researcher during lessons who could look up related material online and share with the group. Now she’s finding ways to adapt to keep those positive aspects of online access, she says, such as having student researchers use a computer in the classroom, or to make more use of the school-issued laptops for some lessons.

Adam Swinyard, the superintendent of Spokane Public Schools, acknowledges that there are trade-offs to the new ban when it comes to the use of tech in instruction.

“We absolutely have lost some power of the opportunity that those devices provide, whether that's, ‘I can really quickly look something up,’ or ‘I can quickly participate in a class poll’ or ‘I can tune my music instrument,’” he told EdSurge. “But I think where we landed in our community, for our schools and for our kids, is what we gain in their level of engagement and ability to focus far outweighs what we're losing in a device being a powerful pedagogical tool inside of the classroom. But I think it's important to acknowledge.”

What they end up teaching students, he argues, is more important. The mantra for the district is that there is a “time and place” for smartphone use, says Swinyard, and that a classroom is not the right setting or occasion, just as he wouldn’t pull out his phone and write a text while he was being interviewed for this article, or sitting in an important meeting.

Some schools with new bans have faced pushback from students, especially where there has been a zero-tolerance for phones even during social time. At a Jasper High School in Plano, Texas, for instance, more than 250 people signed a petition calling on the principal to revise a new ban on smartphones, which forbids use of devices all day, even during lunch and in the halls between classes. “Before the restricted use of cellphones was prohibited, they were a social link, connecting students during lunch and hallway breaks,” the petition reads.

And some parents have complained about the new bans, out of concerns that they would not be able to reach their children in the event of an emergency, such as a school shooting. A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that about 7 in 10 Americans support cellphone bans during class, while only about a third favor an all-day ban.

So one takeaway is that how schools design their smartphone restrictions — and how they communicate the policies to students and parents — are important for how well they work in practice.

Hear more about the pros and cons of new smartphone bans on this week’s EdSurge Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

What Happens When a State Brings Deep Discounts to Child Care?

Rebecca Gale — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 01:19:00 -0700

Teigue Linch recalls the email she got from Pine Forest, her daughters’ child care center in Burlington, Vermont, encouraging families to take advantage of the new state law that allows more people to qualify for child care assistance.

But Linch, who works full time as an office manager for an engineering company, has twin 17-month-old toddlers, a long to-do list and the heavy mental load shared by all parents of young children.

“So I kind of ignored it for a while and didn’t really look at the information to see if it was worth applying,” she said.

Linch and her partner, who works in car insurance, make a combined household income of $120,000, which, at $10,000 per month, is 400 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of four — an amount that would usually be considered far too high to receive any sort of meaningful government subsidy. This is especially true for child care subsidies, which only about one in seven eligible families in the U.S. actually receive.

But then one of Linch’s co-workers started looking into the Vermont-specific child care changes, brought about by Act 76, which passed with a bipartisan veto override to become law in June 2023. He suggested that, even with Linch’s six-figure household income, she should apply.

Linch went online and downloaded the application, which she described as “easy to fill out,” and sent it in.

What happened next was a huge surprise.

“Within 48 hours I had heard back and learned that I qualified,” Linch said. Instead of paying $3,068 each month for child care for her twin girls, she would now be responsible for $1,000, with no additional changes or paperwork on her end. “I didn't believe it,” Linch said. “It just didn’t seem real to me.”

The way the state breaks it down in this handy chart, if Linch’s household income is $10,000 per month for a family of four, their weekly family share for child care is capped at $250. Previously, nearly all of Linch’s take-home salary went to child care for her daughters. She was paid hourly, so if she had to miss work because one girl was sick or Pine Forest was closed for a day, her income would dip.

But now she would have an additional $2,000 each month. What will she do with it? “We finally have the ability to save — period. We had gotten to a point where we were watching our checking account get lower and lower each month,” Linch said. “It’s still too early on to know how it will impact us, but it will be much better.”

Vermont’s Act 76 hit its one-year mark of implementation this summer. The law, paid for with a new payroll tax, is designed so that families who have more than one child in care, like Linch with her twins, will save more. It’s important that the cost savings grow dramatically at two children; the high cost of care for a second kid is the tipping point for many families, where it may make more financial sense for one parent to leave the workforce, explained Erin Roche, director of First Children’s Finance in Vermont, a group that is assisting with implementation of Act 76.

Under the state’s old system, Vermont provided child care subsidies to families earning up to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, though many families receiving assistance had to pay a higher co-pay. As of Oct. 7, Vermont’s child care subsidies will be available to families making 575 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, this rate is close to an adjusted gross household income of $180,000.

For people who study child care policy, such a generous jump is unheard of. Advocates and policy experts will be closely watching how it plays out. Roche estimates that the eligibility leap will make subsidies available to 80 to 90 percent of all Vermont families with young children.

But it’s not just parents like Linch who benefit from the program. Under Act 76, Pine Forest, Linch’s child care center, will also see an increase in the amount it collects, because it will be reimbursed for the true cost of care, rather than just what families can afford. Instead of receiving $3,068 per month to take care of Linch’s two toddlers, the center now receives $3,768 — a $700 jump.

Vermont has also narrowed the gap in reimbursement levels for home-based child care and child care centers, since centers are traditionally reimbursed for care at higher rates. Doing so has made home-based child care more profitable and sustainable, and as a result more than 1,000 new child care slots have been created in Vermont in just a year’s time.

Roche credits the small size of Vermont and the prowess of state agencies with moving quickly to get these systems up and running to support Act 76. One obstacle, she notes, was ensuring the state IT system could get the online application system ready.

“Each of the changes from Act 76 required that a state agency create a system, or change a system. They literally had less than two weeks to make the first changes,” Roche said.

Not every family will see the immediate jump in benefits like Linch’s, but Roche estimates that many will, especially those that have two parents working full time. Families with a parent or guardian at home and not working are not eligible, but the state recently changed its policy so parents in grad school or training programs are now eligible.

Having access to reliable child care is one way to shore up parents participating in the workforce. And it may have the effect of shifting people’s minds about the costs and burdens associated with having more children, when studies show that many families who are opting out of having kids cite cost as a major factor.

Linch said that she and her partner had initially intended to have only one child, “but then we got lucky with twins,” she said with a smile.

Does having additional financial support for child care change her outlook on having more kids in the future?

“I don’t know how to answer,” she said. “But it would make it more feasible, that is for sure.”

For Girls to Succeed in STEM, Confidence Matters as Much as Competence

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

One of Shane Woods’ favorite memories as executive director of Girlstart, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls in the sciences, was as a participant taking her own goddaughter to the organization’s back-to-school extravaganza.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

They zipped through activities with rockets and robots, and Woods asked her goddaughter — named Sailor — what she thought of it all when they were heading home.

“She said, ‘I always liked science. Now I know I can do science,’” Woods recalls. “Unprompted — I didn't ask about careers. For her to have that connection lets us know that her perception is already there of, ‘I can do it.’”

The question for the adults who care about girls like Sailor, Woods says, then becomes: How do we sustain that interest?

That is one of the questions and challenges at the center of a recently released report based on the Girls’ Index, a survey of 17,500 girls in fifth through 12th grades that includes questions about their goals for the future and perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as potential careers.

While women are not just outpacing men in degrees — girls are doing better academically and completing high school on time more frequently than boys — the push for parity has been moving at a glacial pace in STEM. Though on the rise, women are still underrepresented in both degrees and employment in the sciences and technology.

Ruling Our Experiences — a nonprofit that studies the aspirations, behaviors and opinions of girls — compares results from the 2023 survey to those similarly gleaned in 2017.

Their researchers found that while girls who say they’re interested in STEM grew by 10 percentage points to 55 percent, compared to survey results five years prior, the number of girls who describe themselves as confident or smart enough to earn their dream job has plummeted.

“I want everybody who has a girl in their sphere of influence to be aware of this data, because I think that we all have a role in creating a generation of more confident, competent, and capable girls,” Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our Experiences, says, “whether it's in the STEM arena, or in other spaces where girls’ voices and opinions are needed.”

High Interest, Lower Participation

Girls are interested in science and math. More than half of girls in every age group surveyed said they were considering a STEM career, according to the report, and overall interest is up by 10 percent since 2017 — something that holds steady among grade levels, income levels and ethnicities. Interest increased the most among the youngest girls, those in fifth and sixth grade, by 20 percent.

That doesn’t mean that girls are ready to dive into the field.

The report found a myriad of outside factors and social pressures that may be keeping girls from taking STEM classes or seeing themselves in science jobs.

The share of girls who say they are good at math and science fell sharply from 73 percent in 2017 to 59 percent in 2023, and that includes girls whose grades show they excel in those subjects.

“I think that should be especially concerning when we're thinking about the need to ensure that girls have increased representation in the STEM field, in that it's more than just exposing them to STEM opportunities,” Hinkelman says. “We also have to be simultaneously addressing these confidence challenges and their perceptions of their abilities that are simultaneously impacting what they might do next.”

Researchers also expressed concern that gender stereotypes and misconceptions about math and science could be deterring girls from taking those classes as they advance through school. About 28 percent of high school girls reported that they avoid classes with low female enrollment.

Overall, 56 percent of girls say they have felt excluded from an activity because of their gender, and the majority report feeling “pressured to fit into the specific stereotypes that are thought to be appropriate and expected for girls and women.” About the same amount said they avoided taking on leadership roles for fear of being seen as bossy.

In Girlstart’s work introducing girls in 24 school districts across three states to the world of STEM, which includes after-school programs, summer camps and an annual conference, Woods says that the organization strives to both provide role models and foster kinship. Girls already hear the message that there aren’t enough women in science and technology, she adds, and being the first or only girl in a science class isn’t necessarily attractive to them.

“Our girls like community, our girls like relationships, so what Girlstart does is provide that support network of peers who are like-minded,” Woods says. “You may be the only girl in your physics class at that high school, but hopefully through us you know of other girls in physics classes throughout the city, that you all have a network of support, that you are not doing this alone.”

STEM fields also have a messaging problem.

About 89 percent of girls said they want a career where they can help others, but they don’t necessarily see that happening in the sciences. Less than half of girls responded that they wanted both a service career and a STEM career.

“This gap may exist partly because of the stereotype that women are natural caregivers, steering girls towards traditional helping professions,” the report states. “However, STEM fields offer numerous ways to make a positive impact — from developing new medicines to solving environmental issues. By showing girls how STEM careers align with their desire to help, more diverse talent could be attracted to these fields.”

Crisis of Confidence

The data shows a troubling trend when it comes to how girls reported feeling about their abilities and potential.

The percentage of girls who consider themselves confident in 2023 dipped for nearly every grade level compared to 2017, with the largest drop among fifth and sixth graders. The share of girls who say they are not sure if they are smart enough for their dream career increased in every age group.

The confidence issues girls face extend beyond their perceptions of math and science. About 57 percent said they don’t feel cared for at school, and only 39 percent said they feel a sense of belonging at school.

Hinkelman says she was surprised by the particularly sharp drop in confidence reported by girls in fifth through seventh grades.

“I think girls are internalizing a lot of messages from the world that are telling them that they're not good enough, or they're not smart enough, or that there's certain kinds of jobs or careers that aren't really for them,” Hinkelman says. “For many girls, they have an overall low opinion of themselves and their opportunities and their abilities. I think we see that reflected when it comes to their perceptions of their abilities in STEM-specific areas as well.”

The education system on the whole needs to start building confidence in the sciences at the same time students are gaining competence in STEM subjects, she adds.

Woods says that in a digital world built on a system of “likes,” girls need environments where they know where they don’t have to be perfect so long as they are proud of what they’re doing.

The numbers support what Woods sees in her work. The study found that confident girls were 20 percent more likely than their peers to say they wanted a STEM career. The report found among girls who feel supported and accepted at school also showed more interest in STEM — 50 percent more than their peers.

Girls need to know “that they can take risks in that space, that it is safe to learn from one another, to fail in front of each other to get back up and take it as a lesson or a success,” Woods explains. “That is really what's critical in changing how girls see themselves in these careers and what they can do, so we have to reinforce that STEM will allow them to change the world.”

Teaching Feels Like a Dead-End Job. Here’s How Schools Can Change That.

Rachel Herrera — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

On the spectrum of professional experience for K-12 teachers, I am decidedly on the greener side. Although I knew I had a passion for teaching before entering college, I always had this idea in my head that teaching K-12 education wasn’t a real or appropriate profession for an Ivy League, engineering graduate like myself.

Instead of industry or academia, however, I joined the stream of my peers entering the world of business management consulting. I stayed in this role for only three years before going back to school to teach, but my short stint in the corporate world carried me to the classroom with a perspective that allowed me to see all the ways teaching is treated as a calling rather than a career, and how that impacts school teachers.

Teachers lack the structure and career development of other industry and professional jobs and this is important because it is one major factor in creating a broken public education system. Compared to what I experienced myself and have learned from colleagues and ex-classmates in consulting, finance and tech industries, it feels like this lack of opportunity for career progression within K-12 education disincentivizes a talented, driven and diverse workforce, which in turn inhibits the long term success of the education system.

Put more pointedly, teachers being perceived as saints and martyrs due to the realities of their working conditions, instead of serious professionals, is one of the more glaring issues facing K-12 education in the United States.

We’re Not in Consulting Anymore, Toto…

In my short time in the consulting world, I got a glimpse behind the curtain of how different industries operate. I learned about the massive scale of labor, human capital and strategic investment that go into making a successful organization. As a new college grad, I was lucky to work at a company that held an “up or out” culture and provided clear structures and routines for continuous professional feedback, networking and skill development. I also had great mentors who pushed me to think about what I wanted in a career and shared their experiences and advice to foster my professional growth.

Within public education, growth options are almost entirely outside the classroom, either through administration, teacher education or curriculum development. One common path that some teachers will take to advance is to go back to school and pursue an administrative credential to become a principal or vice principal, but it is a significant pivot and career change.

While I also have incredible mentors in teaching, when I asked my closest mentor for constructive professional feedback before she went on a sabbatical, the only thing she did was implore me not to get pulled away from the classroom and into leadership, most likely due to the aforementioned ways teachers attempt to advance and move through the field of education.

Clearly, there is very little formal growth inherent or possible within teaching, which I believe impacts the retention of a highly skilled and diverse educational workforce. Bringing my perspective as a young professional to a high school, I have been endlessly frustrated with the disparity between what I want and am inspired to accomplish and what the system allows me to reasonably get out of any effort I put in.

Feeling Stuck

Another thing I’ve found difficult about this issue is that simply being a teacher doesn’t really say much about your job description; it doesn’t give any information about your particular working conditions, responsibilities, expectations or compensation because these vary so much from school to school, not to mention across the country.

Though I’ve only worked at one school, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with math and science teachers nationwide. From the poorest rural schools to the most elite boarding schools, I have become increasingly vexed by the lack of incentive structure or clear avenues of professional growth within the teaching profession that I could verbalize in a meaningful way in a resume or cover letter.

Other fields offer structured opportunities for career growth in several ways, including but not limited to some sort of organizational hierarchy in which promotions lead to increased compensation and different responsibilities. While this sort of promoting-from-within and workforce investment and development is not the case for every corporation or industry, in the teaching career, it is practically nonexistent.

Public school teachers are often limited geographically by pensions, so moving across state lines means forfeiting your hard-earned retirement benefits. In some states, there are required portfolios or observations teachers must complete to receive tenure, but pay bumps are not always a guarantee. Once you have taught for a certain number of years, eager teachers can work incredibly hard for at least a full year to receive National Boards Certification, but first, they have to pass the test — and, yet again, the reward may differ by state. California has a stipend for those who achieve this distinction but not an actual raise; in many states, it is a purely symbolic title with no financial compensation.

Meanwhile, in my previous job industry, many of my colleagues were able to seek out a more supportive environment where they could be competitively compensated and grow in their careers. Clearly, not all companies or other jobs have these opportunities, but even the ability to switch employers for upward career mobility is complicated for teachers. All of these hidden factors baked into the decentralized educational system can prevent teachers from the same level of fluid movement between schools and districts that their similarly educated peers in professional industries are used to. Ultimately, this hinders educators' ability to navigate an employment landscape in a way that promotes their overall career growth and professional development.

Putting Your Money Where Your Labor Is

Many industries operate on the basic principles of rewarding talent for positive, sustained performance. In the many fractured systems that make up the overall U.S. education system, talent and effort often only lead to heartwarming notes, the occasional staff pizza party and more responsibilities with an ever-shrinking margin of effective compensation. With the lack of growth opportunities in this career, is it any wonder that recruiting and maintaining a diverse teaching workforce is an issue for our schools today?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing this issue. Districts and schools, whether public, private or charter, are all funded differently and have different methods for allocating their budgets. But in considering how to fix schools or taking stock of the current state and future of public education in the US, policymakers and stakeholders with any ability to make a change in their schools or districts should not discount the effect of developing a stronger route of professional advancement for teachers.

If we don't build a better system, one that rewards extra labor and additional roles that come with being a teacher, we risk further creating the feeling that being a teacher feels like a dead-end job, and while some educators have come to this conclusion and left the field, I hope myself and other colleagues can feel the growth and necessary support we need in our careers to stay in the classroom.

As the Job Market Changes, Is a College Degree Less of a ‘Meal Ticket’ Than in the Past?

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:11:47 -0700

When Gina Petersen graduated with her associate degree from Kirkwood Community College two years ago, she described it as “the biggest accomplishment I have ever done.”

As a returning adult college student, she had struggled to fit her studies in part time, online, while working as a trainer for a tech company. She had gotten that job through connections, and she hoped that a college degree would be a big help if she ever needed to find a new job in the future.

We told the story of Petersen’s college journey — which took her more than seven years and a couple of false starts to complete — as part of a three-part podcast series we did in 2022 called Second Acts.

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For this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast, we checked back in with Petersen to see what the degree has meant for her professional and personal life.

And we found that the credential has not opened as many doors as she had hoped.

A few months after we last talked to Gina, she got laid off from her training job after 10 years at the company. And at first she quickly found a project manager position through her networks. But she felt the job wasn’t a good fit, so she quit after a little more than a year, hoping she’d quickly find another position.

What she encountered, however, was a job market that suddenly felt much more daunting.

“I’ve sent my resume to, I’d say, 150 different places for 150 different roles, and yet, nothing,” she says, even after getting professional help crafting her resume.

What’s worse, she says, she has been ghosted by employers when she does get initial interest. “I’ve had two people reach out for phone interviews and say, ‘Yes’ and confirm, and then I literally don’t get called,” she says.

Petersen is not alone, according to labor market experts.

Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, notes that because it has become easier to apply for jobs, thanks to one-click applications on company websites and the growth of platforms like Linkedin, job seekers have more opportunities than ever. But they also have to work harder to find the right fit as a result. Whereas once it might be common to apply to 15 jobs, now it’s not unusual to have to apply to more than 150, he says.

“Now, you’re applying to a lot more things – you’re getting more cracks at the bat — but you’re just getting a lot more rejections,” Berger says.

That can feel demoralizing to job candidates, he adds, while also hard for employers as they struggle to sift through a flood of applicants.

Meanwhile, Berger says that the number of jobs for recent graduates has fallen in recent years, and just having a degree is not as guaranteed a “meal ticket” as in the past.

“College graduates still get generally better-paying jobs than people who don’t have a college degree, and there’s a wider range of opportunities available to them when they’re looking for a job,” he says. “But if you’re looking at how much of a boost it provides, probably it’s smaller than it was in the past.”

Even so, Petersen says she is glad she got her degree, as she learned valuable skills in college that she put to use in her job. But she isn’t looking to go back for more higher education at this point.

Hear more about Petersen’s search, trends in hiring and what colleges can do to respond to this changing landscape on this week’s EdSurge Podcast.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

Despite Historic Funding, Early Childhood Educators Continue to Struggle, Report Finds

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 02:01:00 -0700

Despite the historic funding that was funneled into the field in the wake of the pandemic, early care and education continues to be one of the most beleaguered occupations in the United States.

Early childhood educators earn, on average, $13.07 per hour, a wage that puts them in the bottom 3 percent of workers nationally. (Elementary and middle school teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $31.80 per hour, and U.S. workers, across occupations, earn about $23 an hour.)

That’s according to findings from the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a report that typically comes out every two years and is produced and authored by a team of researchers at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.

The U.S. early care and education system was broken long before the pandemic, thanks to a dynamic where families can’t afford to pay more while providers can’t afford to charge less. Those costs are, in effect, subsidized by the paltry wages earned by early childhood educators — the teachers and staff in these programs, about 98 percent of whom are women and half of whom are women of color — even though they are entrusted with one of the most important jobs that exists, said Caitlin McLean, lead author of the report and director of multi-state programs at CSCCE.

“Our child care workforce — the majority of whom have some higher education — are building our children’s brains in the most critical period of their development,” McLean said during a press call last week. “[Yet] early educators are paid so little that many worry where their next meal will come from.”

In early care and education programs, employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans are rare. Close to half (43 percent) of early educators rely on public assistance, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to make ends meet, which the report estimates is costing taxpayers $4.7 billion a year.

The billions of federal dollars pumped into the field in recent years — including $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act — are widely seen as having been successful in helping stabilize programs and prevent massive waves of closures. However, most of those dollars expired in September 2023, while the remainder expired about two weeks ago.

Absent ongoing funding and a more permanent solution for the field, ARPA dollars seem not to have meaningfully moved the needle. New data in the Workforce Index underscores that reality.

“The funding was not about making the ideal child care system,” McLean said. “It was about preventing the utter collapse of the system we had.”

Corrine Hendrickson’s situation illustrates why the funding stopped short of transforming the field and the lives of those who work in it.

Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career, and it really isn’t.

— Corrine Hendrickson

Direct-to-provider payments from ARPA allowed Hendrickson to make changes to her licensed home-based child care program in rural Wisconsin and spend money that she’d never had. She hired an employee for the first time, allowing her to step away for personal appointments. She made repairs and improvements to the building. She increased her own wages from $8 an hour to $12, which she said gave her enough extra money to buy her own kids clothes and pay monthly bills on time.

“Without the ARPA funding, I would’ve closed and never reopened,” she said, adding that as a home-based provider, “if I closed, I would’ve lost my home.”

But then ARPA funding expired last year, and she was forced to make hard decisions just to maintain her new hourly rate of $12. She has raised tuition rates on families three times in the past year, she shared, for a total increase of $70 per week. Some families, she added, have reached out to inquire about her program but then backed off when they learn she charges $259 to $281 per week, depending on the child’s age. It’s just too expensive, they tell her.

“Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career,” Hendrickson said, “and it really isn’t.”

Nationally, wages for early childhood educators have increased by 4.6 percent in the last few years, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Index. That’s still less than the overall workforce, whose wages have increased by an average of 4.9 percent, as well as those of fast food workers (5.2 percent) and retail workers (6.8 percent). The latter two occupations are relevant because many educators have left their positions in recent years for jobs in food and retail, where wages are similar or higher and stress is much lower.

The national average, though, is just an average. About a dozen states have stepped in with their own investments in early care and education since ARPA dollars expired, helping programs and staff to avoid the so-called “child care cliff” that others have endured.

Some states have seen much bigger wage increases for early educators; in nine states, plus Washington, D.C., early educators experienced wage increases of more than 10 percent. The highest gains were in D.C., with an average 27.1 percent wage increase for educators.

‘This Is a Serious Job’

Lida Barthol is an infant and toddler teacher in Washington, D.C., where her salary has soared in the last few years.

Barthol entered the field in 2016, when she was earning about $11 an hour. Now a lead teacher with a bachelor’s degree, and with help from the District of Columbia’s targeted compensation program for early childhood educators, she is making the equivalent of about $36 an hour.

In 2021, after the DC Council approved a tax increase on the city’s highest-income residents, the District launched the Pay Equity Fund, an effort to increase the compensation of early childhood educators so that it better aligned with that of K-12 teachers with similar qualifications and experience.

“Which is insane,” Barthol said. “It’s unheard of.”

In the program’s first year, educators received one-time payments of up to $14,000. Barthol remembers calling her friend, another early childhood educator, in disbelief over the state of her bank account. “We just sat there and cried,” she said. “It was a really big moment.”

Now, the District funnels Barthol’s wage supplement through her employer, so it is reflected in her regular paychecks. The program — which has led to higher recruitment and retention in the field — shows what is possible if early childhood educators are paid a livable wage.

“It really changed everything about my life,” Barthol said. It gave her and her partner of seven years the financial security to get engaged and plan a small wedding, which is set to take place next month. It’s a “cultural milestone,” she said, that she didn’t feel stable enough to have before.

It has also made her feel that her work — her career path — is valued.

“I used to say, ‘There’s no reason to get a master’s degree in early education because you’ll never earn that money back.’ But really, I love this field. I love learning. I love thinking deeply about the work I’m doing,” said Barthol, who graduated in the spring with her master’s degree in human development.

“It gave me the confidence to be like, ‘This is a serious job,’” she said. “You don’t need a degree to do an amazing job, but it is just that affirmation that this is serious work, and [with] young children, there’s complexity there.”

With federal pandemic relief now gone and a new presidential administration set to begin in a few months, the field is at a “crossroads,” the authors of the report wrote.

Barthol has been attuned to the candidates this election cycle, she said. The nominees of both major parties have mentioned child care at a number of campaign events and even during the recent vice presidential debate.

They’re not always getting it right, Barthol noted. She cited a recent interview with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who argued that the solution to sky-high child care costs for families was, first, to lean more on “grandma and grandpa” for care, and then, if that option isn’t available, to reduce regulations and lower qualifications for entering the workforce.

Vance suggested that the problem with the field is that the barrier to entry is too high, Barthol said, and that plenty of people want to work in early childhood education but can’t get a degree.

“What barrier to entry? You don’t need a degree,” Barthol said. “The issue is the pay being so low and the unpredictability of benefits.”

She’s seen many young people enter the field, enthusiastic about working with kids, only to realize how “physically, mentally and emotionally demanding it is,” then receive that first paycheck and decide, nope, this isn’t going to work for them.

“It’s not that the barrier to entry is so high,” Barthol reiterated. “It’s that the system is not built to support young families and the people who care for their children.”

Phenomena-Based Learning and 3D Science: Inspiring Curiosity and Making Sense of the World

Steven Smithwhite — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:55:00 -0700

On a bright, sunny day, a group of first-graders eagerly begins a science investigation called “Shadow Town.” The teacher gathers them in a circle and asks, “What causes shadows?” It’s a good question. The students are all familiar with shadows, have had fun with them and no doubt played shadow puppets, but that’s different from being able to explain them. Many suggestions are shouted out as students’ imaginations get fired up by the mystery of light and darkness.

The teacher takes the students outside to test their ideas. “Can I run away from my shadow?” one student wonders. Another asks, “Can I trick my shadow into disappearing?” As they experiment with shadows, predict their movements, explore how light interacts with different materials, and discuss what they see with their partners, the students learn not just about the mechanics of shadows but also about the scientific process of inquiry and investigation. Through this exploration, they begin to apply their newfound knowledge to solve a real-world problem: why the town of Rjukan, Norway, spends much of the year in shadow and how different solutions could work.

Combining phenomena-based learning with 3D science standards helps students see science as a way to make sense of the world around them. They become more motivated to learn and more capable of thinking critically about the challenges they will face in the future.

“Shadow Town,” a module in the K-8 curriculum Twig Science, is an example of phenomena-based learning in action, an approach that taps into students' natural curiosity to make sense of the world around them. In this context, phenomena are simply observable events or situations. They play a crucial role in science education because they provide students with concrete, engaging examples of scientific concepts in the real world. They provide great opportunities to develop student inquiry — students see something happening, ask questions about it and conduct research to learn more about it.

In "Shadow Town," students investigate why the town of Rjukan, Norway, spends much of the year in shadow.
Image credit: Imagine Learning

Phenomena in the Context of 3D Science

Phenomena-based learning also aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other three-dimensional (3D) science standards that emphasize a comprehensive, integrated understanding of science. These standards were designed to move science education away from rote memorization and toward engaging students in practices real scientists use to explore and model the world, fostering deeper understanding of scientific concepts and developing skills like critical thinking, collaboration and communication.

The NGSS and other 3D science standards are structured around three dimensions of science learning:

Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs): These involve the skills and behaviors that scientists and engineers engage in, such as asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, and constructing explanations.
Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs): These overarching concepts bridge disciplinary boundaries, such as patterns, cause and effect, energy and matter, structure and function, and stability and change.
Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs): These are fundamental ideas in science that students should understand, divided into four domains — physical sciences, life sciences, Earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology and applications of science.

The integration of these three dimensions helps students develop a holistic understanding of science, moving beyond memorizing isolated facts to actively engaging in scientific practices and understanding the broader concepts that connect different areas of science.

3D Learning with Twig Science

A Motivation to Engage

Phenomena-based learning and 3D science standards naturally complement each other. Phenomena-based learning provides the context and motivation for students to engage in the practices, concepts and core ideas outlined in the standards. For example, in investigating “Shadow Town,” students engage in Science and Engineering Practices by asking questions and planning investigations to understand why shadows change. They use the Crosscutting Concept of “patterns” to observe how shadows behave at different times of the day and the Disciplinary Core Idea of Earth’s movements to explain these patterns. Through this process, they’re not just learning scientific facts but experiencing science as a dynamic, integrated discipline that helps them make sense of the world.

Recommended Resources:

Twig Science: A comprehensive, NGSS-aligned science program full of exciting, real-world STEM challenges that spark student engagement and a long-lasting love of science.
Unlocking Success with Phenomena-Based Science Instruction: In Twig Science, students investigate and make sense of phenomena through multiple modalities, empowering them to connect with science in the world around them.
The Ultimate Guide to Three-Dimensional Learning: Teach real-world skills with 3D science and find resources including practical approaches, printable posters and a podcast episode.
The Ultimate Guide to Phenomena: A guide to sparking student inquiry and discovery, including a podcast episode, a breakdown of anchor phenomena in Twig Science, and downloadable phenomena trackers.
Open Any Door with Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity: A series of blog posts exploring the 4Cs of STEM.
Practical Approaches to 3D Science: A foundations paper exploring Crosscutting Concepts, Science and Engineering Practices, and Disciplinary Core Ideas.

Multimedia resources in Twig Science bring phenomena to life that students might not otherwise have access to.
Image credit: Imagine Learning

Creating opportunities for such investigations requires thoughtful design and alignment with educational standards. In designing high-quality instructional materials and even entire curricula that support phenomena-based learning, several key areas demand attention:

Rich, real-world phenomena: Across grades K-8, effective curricula feature carefully chosen phenomena — such as the passing of the seasons, light reflecting in a mirror or the erosion of mountains — that are relevant, observable and meaningful to students. They’re complex enough to require students to engage deeply with the dimensions of science but accessible enough to be explored through student-led inquiry and investigation.
High-quality multimedia resources: Videos, interactive simulations and virtual labs bring phenomena to life that students might not otherwise have access to, providing dynamic, visual experiences that enhance understanding.
Engaging and clear learning materials: Learning materials should be engaging and aligned to 3D science standards. They should guide students through the inquiry process, provide opportunities for reflection and discussion, and scaffold learning to include all students in investigations.
An innovative assessment system: Assessment systems should help teachers evaluate student understanding of the three dimensions of the NGSS. These systems include a range of assessment strategies, from pre-exploration activities that gauge prior knowledge to formative and summative tasks, plus built-in data-reporting tools to help track student progress throughout their learning journeys.

Combining phenomena-based learning with 3D science standards helps students see science as a way to make sense of the world around them. They become more motivated to learn and more capable of thinking critically about the challenges they will face in the future. As students engage with real-world phenomena, they not only learn about science but also begin to think and act like scientists, developing a lifelong sense of wonder and inquiry that will help them deal with all kinds of challenges they will face throughout their lives, in education and beyond.

How Much Does Family Income Matter for Student Outcomes?

Daniel Mollenkamp — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.

She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.

The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.

Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.

This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.

But rare or not, that experience with Eve stuck with Dearing like it was pinned somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter when families gain income if they've been living in poverty, Dearing wondered. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to make such a little dent in boosting education achievement for students from low-income backgrounds?

It Adds Up

Years later, Dearing tried to tackle these questions. His answer? Some students just receive much fewer chances to thrive.

That’s what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to figure out how access to opportunities accrued over time for students, and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents made — when the students were in early childhood — and how their lives turned out. To do this, the researchers pulled federal data that followed 814 students from birth until the age of 26. Those students lived in 10 cities from around the U.S.

What did they find? It’s about “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth through the end of high school, children from high-income families had six-to-seven times as many chances to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families had four times as many chances as low-income families.

According to an author of the study, that means family income is indirectly related to how far a student pursues education or how much money they make in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they find themselves in supportive learning environments, whether that’s in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and after-school programs. So income helps, but primarily because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.

The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it can’t technically prove that the accumulation of opportunities “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with their research, he adds. The paper also didn’t look into how the timing of learning opportunities — say, whether they occurred in early childhood or in high school — might make a difference.

But from the perspective of the researchers, what matters is the cumulative effect of those chances over time.

Some children are experiencing opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the settings in which they're living and growing — at home, in child care, at the school — and other children are, if they're lucky, experiencing an opportunity to be in a highly enriching context in one of those settings, Dearing says. And that has tremendous implications for solving achievement differences between children growing up poor and children growing up in higher-income families, he adds.

Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that positively powerful programs such as high-quality preschool make only a small dent in how those children's lives turn out, Dearing says.

Translating these insights into more chances for students to thrive is tough.

“The inequity is extreme, and so it's going to take extreme measures to end that,” Dearing adds. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students’ lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.

A consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, can’t control all the factors here. The answer may lie more in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing toward the community school model and support programs such as City Connects at Boston College. These models claim to support the “whole child” by building a network that can assist with needs outside of the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child might be hungry or to a free eyeglasses clinic. In some sense, these models use the schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while letting teachers focus on the education component, Dearing says.

The Land of Opportunity?

Efforts to staunch inequality could also soon see a political push: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has outlined a plan for “economic opportunity,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it argues will breathe new life into the American middle class.

But in the meantime, circumstances may be getting starker.

Since 1991, when the students trailed by the study were born, the country has seen rising inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. It’s entirely possible that we have underestimated how big the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. Had the children been born a decade later, it’s possible the students they studied would have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and upper-income families, he says.

There have also been some positive developments, though. There’s more public preschool these days, and there’s been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.

What’s more, there are still research questions to answer.

A previous study authored by Dearing showed that early childhood “opportunities” could compensate for poverty, lifting students’ educational attainment.

But if the research were being conducted today, Dearing says he would pay closer attention to cultural differences that might boost students’ life outcomes in the absence of money. For instance, in some Black communities caregiver roles often extend beyond the parents, with other family members like grandmothers playing a big role in childrens’ home lives and what learning opportunities they have there. But researchers have overfocused on “nuclear family” roles, and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.

If Smart Glasses Are Coming, What Will That Mean for Classrooms?

Jeffrey R. Young — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 02:50:00 -0700

When Meta held its annual conference at the end of September, the tech giant announced it is betting that the next wave of computing will come in the form of smart eyeglasses.

Mark Zuckberberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, held up what he described as the first working prototype of Orion, which lets wearers see both the physical world and a computer display hovering in the field of vision.

“They’re not a headset,” he said on stage as he announced the device, which looked like a set of unusually chunky eyeglasses. “This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it.”

For educators, this might not come as welcome news.

After all, one of the hottest topics in edtech these days is the growing practice of banning smartphones in schools, after teachers have reported that the devices distract students from classroom activities and socializing in person with others. And a growing body of research, popularized by the Jonathan Haidt book “The Anxious Generation,” argues that smartphone and social media use harms the mental health of teenagers.

When it’s proving hard enough to regulate the appropriate use of smartphones, what will it be like to manage a rush of kids wearing computers on their faces?

Some edtech experts see upsides, though, when the technology is ready to be used for educational activities.

The idea of using VR headsets to enter an educational multiverse — the last big idea Meta was touting when it changed its corporate name three years ago from Facebook — hasn’t caught on widely, in part because getting a classroom full of students fitted with headsets and holding controllers can be difficult for teachers (not to mention expensive to obtain all that gear). But if smart glasses become cheap enough for a cart to be wheeled in with enough pairs for each student, so they can all do some activity together that blends the virtual world with in-person interactions, they could be a better fit.

“Augmented reality allows for more sharing and collaborative work than VR,” says Maya Georgieva, who runs an innovation center for VR and AR at The New School in New York City. “Lots of these augmented reality applications build on the notion of active learning and experiential learning naturally.”

And there is some initial research that has found that augmented reality experiences in education can lead to improvements in learning outcomes since, as one recent research paper put it, “they transform the learning process into a full-body experience.”

Cheating Glasses?

The Orion glasses that Zuckerberg previewed last week are not ready for prime time — in fact the Meta CEO said they won’t be released to the general public until 2027.

(EdSurge receives philanthropic support from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Meta’s CEO. Learn more about EdSurge ethics and policies here and supporters here.)

But the company already sells smart eyeglasses through a partnership with sunglass-maker Ray-Ban, which are now retailing for around $300. And other companies make similar products as well.

These gadgets, which have been on the market for a couple of years in some form, don’t have a display. But they do have a small built-in computer, a camera, a microphone and speakers. And recent advances in AI mean that newer models can serve as a talking version of a chatbot that users can access when they’re away from their computer or smartphone.

While so far the number of students who own smart glasses appears low, there have already been some reports of students using smart glasses to try to cheat.

This year in Tokyo, for instance, an 18-year-old allegedly used smart glasses to try to cheat on a university entrance exam. He apparently took pictures of his exam questions, posted them online during the test, and users on X, formerly Twitter, gave him the answers (which he could presumably hear read to him on his smart glasses). He was detected and his test scores were invalidated.

Meanwhile, students are sharing videos on TikTok where they explain how to use smart glasses to cheat, even low-end models that have few “smart” features.

“Using these blue light smart glasses on a test would be absolutely diabolical,” says one TikTok user’s video, describing a pair of glasses that can simply pair with a smartphone by bluetooth and cost only about $30. “They look like regular glasses, but they have speakers and microphones in them so you can cheat on a test. So just prerecord your test or your answers or watch a video while you're at the test and just listen to it and no one can tell that you’re looking or listening to anything.”

On Reddit discussions, professors have been wondering whether this technology will make it even harder to know whether the work students are doing is their own, compounding the problems caused by ChatGPT and other new AI tools that have given students new ways to cheat on homework that are difficult to detect.

One commenter even suggested just giving up on doing tests and assignments and trying to find new ways of assessing student knowledge. “I think we have too many assessments that have limited benefit and no one here wants to run a police state to check if students actually did what they say they did,” the user wrote. “I would appreciate if anyone has a functional viable alternative to the current standard. The old way will benefit the well off and dishonest, while the underprivileged and moral will suffer (not that this is new either).”

Some of the school and state policies that ban smartphones might also apply to these new smart glasses. A state law in Florida, for instance, restricts the use of “wireless communication devices,” which could include glasses, watches, or any new gadget that gets invented that connects electronically.

“I would compare it very much to when smartphones really came on the scene and became a regular part of our everyday lives,” says Kyle Bowen, a longtime edtech expert who is now deputy chief information officer at Arizona State University, noting that these glasses might impact a range of activities if they catch on, including education.

There could be upsides in college classrooms, he predicts.

The benefit he sees for smart glasses is the pairing of AI and the devices, so that students might be able to get real-time feedback about, say a lab exercise, by asking the chatbot to weigh in on what it sees through the camera of the glasses as students go about the task.

How Did School Infrastructure Get So ‘Dire’?

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lewis Ferebee, chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, stands at the top of a staircase at John Lewis Elementary when he’s approached by a couple of his constituents for handshakes. He has to reach down a bit — the third-grade boys only stand about waist-high to Ferebee.

The school got a face-lift three years ago. The renovations transformed the noisy, open-concept hallways — relics of the Open Education Movement from the ’60s and ’70s — into individual classrooms. Teachers can now talk to their students without the distracting din of chatter from other classrooms, but the garage doors that double as windows can be opened when teachers want to do activities that involve getting students from multiple classrooms working together.

The work that went into John Lewis Elementary highlights something unique about DC Public Schools. Since 2007, its Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization has kept and systematically worked through a schedule for upgrading schools. At the time, the district reportedly had a backlog of 20,000 work orders.

That level of overwhelm may sound familiar to educators at school districts nationwide who work in school buildings that are “in dire need of renovation,” as described in a recent brief from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The average age of school buildings is 49 years — just shy of the end of their lifespan — according to the brief, and more than half have “never undergone any major renovations” since they were built around the time of the Vietnam War.

The Biden administration has pumped a uniquely large amount of money into school infrastructure, according to experts who spoke with EdSurge, perhaps most well-known through ESSER funds in response to the pandemic. The issue of crumbling and outdated school buildings has generally been “orphaned” at the federal level, as one expert put it.

How Boredom Helped My Students Overcome Apathy and Build Executive Functioning

Fatema Elbakoury — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

We’re halfway through “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler, and we’ve arrived at a crucial turning point in the plot. The main character, Lauren Olamina, loses her family and home to an arson attack. I wanted my students to fully experience the severity of this loss, so instead of continuing with a workshop model I’d been using throughout the unit thus far, I decided to read to the class:

I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the hills…I heard a lot of gunfire--individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire…

“Why are we reading this?” a student interrupts. The class remains quiet. I look up to see most resting their hands against their heads. They look bored and glance up at me with their faces downcast. I see some of them begin to turn their phones over, and others reach into their pockets.

“Because it’s important. This world isn’t that far off from ours,” I say.

Another student responds, “But it’s not that bad.”

“But what if one day it is?” I ask. “Don’t you think that matters to you?”

Another student shrugs. Another stares at me blankly.

Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, yet some would argue Butler’s predictions are bone-chillingly accurate. Unfortunately, none of that matters if the only thing students want to do is go back to their phones.

For many of my students, reading is not a precursor to revolutionary action, but a cumbersome task that is always a preamble to another tedious assessment. Even if this is the case, reading has been shown to be a tool for building empathy. Empathy is how we learn to care for people we will never meet. In this case, the expediency of technology has created a sense of immediate gratification that stands opposite to the empathy that reading can cultivate.

When I talk to my coworkers about the apathy I notice in my classroom, we realize that the large chunks of writing, the big words and the complexity of Butler’s ideas are all turnoffs for our students. When students are simply met with a page that has a lot of words on it, disinterest is immediate.

I recognize it is not my place to mirror their complacency but to model what it would look like to care. But how do I get them to care when I can’t even get them to see the value of a book that clearly shows us the effects of our collective negligence? It’s impossible to reach this empathy that reading can provide without first helping students gain tools to build the mental and emotional stamina to engage with complex texts.

Building Boredom and Executive Functioning

While people are not yet roaming the streets en masse scavenging for food and water, around the world, people are doing just that as I write this. In our country, our democracy is at stake as well. Despite all this, Generation Alpha cares less and less.

Lately, it appears that students are more interested in rapidly scrolling through their friends’ stories, checking their likes and direct messages and uploading stories with filters on social media apps. Their impulses are wired to do this and, in my opinion, focus too much on the self, the immediacy of tasks and the imminent gratification from likes — it does not allow students to sit deeply and meaningfully in someone else’s emotions and experiences.

Students will reach for their phones during transitions, in between reading passages, whole-group discussions and during moments of boredom. While taking phones away is a first step, this doesn’t address the problem — the immediate withdrawal in front of a dense, complex text. Reversing these trends requires students to lean into the practice of boredom.

Boredom, despite the negative connotations, is a discipline that frees the mind from the perceived need for constant activity, and research shows that doing nothing can lead to inspiration, imagination and presence. Boredom is a feeling that students need to learn to befriend to tackle a complex text — because being bored should not be a reason to miss out on a thought-provoking reading experience, such as the one “Parable of the Sower” provides.

Boredom should be practiced daily and explicitly in classrooms. Set a timer and just sit there with your students. Put phones away and leave nothing on the desk. Sit there. Do nothing. This trains the mind to refuse any impulses and reach for distractions from the present moment.

In my classroom, I’ve implemented sustained silent reading (SSR) with no comprehension assessments to build reading stamina and help students find a genuine love for reading. Like boredom, this practice also requires silence and presence. Although a student’s mind might wander during this time, the expectation that they are silent and interfacing with words demands self-regulation.

Boredom and SSR are also connected to executive functioning because they demand that students be present, focused and control their impulses. When students are only allowed to sit in class and think about their thoughts or look at a book, it is a necessary first step to reading dense texts because reading requires focus. With time, the impulse to pull out a phone or withdraw from difficult tasks will hopefully be mitigated when students have learned that being bored or still is not such a bad thing.

Going Down Reading

To be honest, on most days, I feel helpless. Even when phones are away, the disconnect remains. And in a sense, the disconnect is incredibly valid: despite all the activism, there is little change that students can cling to. If a young person is looking at the gaps between social movements and the continued fracturing of our world, it makes sense to give up and focus on the self.

Some of my solutions have been to couple parts of “Parable of the Sower” with current and local events. In the Bay Area, poverty rates are extremely high with the soaring cost of living. In San Francisco, homelessness has long been a crisis. The wealth gap is immense and we’ve seen the effects of climate change with extreme heat in parts of the Bay. Through my efforts, I have gotten students to see the correlations between these harsh realities and the circumstances of Lauren’s world. But even then, the apathy remains.

“What’s the point? The world is going to end anyway,” they tell me.

And if it were true that the world would end, there would still be a period after the collapse of society where all we’ll have left is each other. Then, it’ll come down to empathy and community. When Lauren finally succeeds at building her community, she tells them:

...If we’re willing to work, our chances are good here. I’ve got some seed in my pack…What we have to do at this point is more like gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand--composting, watering, weeding, picking worms or slugs…We work together, we can defend ourselves, and we can protect the kids. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children--the ones we have now and the one we will have…

Although the work of building community is daunting, as Lauren says, we must protect our children. They will bear the brunt of a broken world. We protect them by empowering them with the tools needed to survive. Empathy is the tool for survival in a world shaped by individualism, but empathy cannot be practiced with poor impulse control. Empathy requires discipline, and discipline comes from facing and befriending discomfort.

In my ideal classroom, students are present, reading the words and forming connections with themselves and the world. They push themselves to engage with dense paragraphs. They annotate. They may struggle, but they appreciate the long process of learning and understanding. They walk away thinking about the world with expanded horizons because they’ve just experienced a life that is not theirs. But the presence that leads to this empathy will only come if a student is self-regulated enough to manage the impulses that create disengagement. If a student thinks all answers should come immediately from a single tool in their hand — their phones — disengagement is inevitable.

But I know that as long as I am in the classroom, my duty as a teacher is to model care and empathy, regardless of my frustrations. I am still comforted by that one student who will see the value of reading a novel that tells us who we will become if we forget about each other, for if we do not have each other, we have nothing.

Looking Back on the Long, Bumpy Rise of Online College Courses

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:47:12 -0700

When Robert Ubell first applied for a job at a university's online program back in the late ’90s, he had no experience with online education. But then again, hardly anyone else did either.

First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (something like the way AI chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were even trying to deliver courses on it. Ubell’s experience was in academic publishing, and he had recently finished a stint as the American publisher of Nature magazine and was looking for something different. He happened to have some friends at Stanford University who had shown him what the university was doing using the web to train workers at local factories and high-tech businesses, and he was intrigued by the potential.

So when he saw that Stevens Institute of Technology had an opening to build online programs, he applied, citing the weekend he spent observing Stanford’s program.

“That was my only background, my only experience,” he says, “and I got the job.”

And as at many college campuses at the time, Ubell faced resistance from the faculty.

“Professors were totally opposed,” he says, fearing that the quality would never be as good as in-person teaching.

The story of how higher ed went from a reluctant innovator to today — when more than half of American college students take at least one online course — offers plenty of lessons for how to try to bring new teaching practices to colleges.

One big challenge that has long faced online learning is who will pay the costs of building something new, like a virtual campus.

Ubell points to philanthropic foundations as key to helping many colleges, including Stevens, take their first steps into online offerings.

And it turns out that the most successful teachers in the new online format weren’t ones who were the best with computers or the most techy, says Frank Mayadas, who spent 17 years at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation giving out grants hoping to spark adoptions of online learning.

“It was the faculty who had a great conviction to be good teachers who were going to be good no matter how they did it,” says Mayadas. “If they were good in the classroom, they were usually good online.”

We dig into the bumpy history of online higher education on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. And we hear what advice online pioneers have for those trying the latest classroom innovations.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

How This District Tech Coach Still Makes Time to Teach — in a Multi-Sensory Immersive Room

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 01:35:00 -0700

Miguel Quinteros spent over a decade as something of a tech-savvy teacher — one not afraid to try new things in the classroom, in hopes that they would make learning more interesting, more intuitive and more engaging for his students.

He took that proclivity to the next level a few years ago, when he accepted a position as a K-12 technology coach in a small school district in western Michigan.

Quinteros loves the work he gets to do, trying to solve problems for teachers, students and administrators in his rural farming community, removing obstacles that come their way and generally continuing in his pursuit of looking for ways to make learning more fun and approachable to students.

And he hasn’t had to abandon teaching. In 2022, Quinteros’ district, Mason County Central School District, opened a first-of-its-kind immersive room that, with augmented and virtual reality advanced technology, allows students to deepen their learning with interactive, sensory-oriented lessons — from the World War I trenches to erupting volcanoes to ancient Greece. Quinteros manages the immersive room for the district and helps bring lessons to life for children of all ages.

“I just get to do the fun part now: teach,” he shares. “I don't do the grading and the discipline anymore.”

In any given school, a robust school staff is quietly working behind the scenes to help shape the day for kids. In our Role Call series, we spotlight staff members who sometimes go unnoticed, but whose work is integral in transforming a school into a lively community. For this installment, we’re featuring Miguel Quinteros.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Name: Miguel Quinteros

Age: 51

Location: Scottville, Michigan

Role: K-12 technology coach

Years in the field: Three in current role, after 11 as a teacher

EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to your role as a technology coach?

Miguel Quinteros: Well, I'm originally from El Salvador. I came when I was 25 for medical treatment, and then I had to stay in the country and find something to do. So I became a youth minister with the Catholic Church. Then I thought, ‘Oh, I like to work with young people,’ so I decided to become a teacher. When I was studying to become a teacher, I had to choose a major and a minor, and I picked social studies as my major and computer science as my minor. With my minor being computer science, I focused a lot on how to use technology in the classroom, how to do things that we would not be able to do otherwise.

Once I became a teacher, even though I was teaching Spanish, computer science and social studies to middle and high school students, I was always using technology in the classroom. It was a small town, and word got out. After the pandemic, I think a lot of school districts realized that teachers needed more support with technology, and a lot of tech coach positions came up. So then the district where I work now actually recruited me to come take this position.

When people outside of school ask you what you do, like at a social event, how do you describe your work to them?

Most of the time, I don't like to tell people what I do. I feel like, especially being Hispanic, when people see me in social [settings], they assume that I work in the fields doing migrant work, agriculture. And the moment they know what I do, it’s almost like they give me more importance. I like people to see me for who I am as a person, not for what I do.

But if I meet somebody, and I can see that they genuinely accept me for who I am, then I open up more with them. Otherwise, I guess I'm kind of guarded with this topic. It's sad, but that's the reality, and I have to live in my skin every day.

Let’s say you met someone who was genuinely interested in you. How would you describe to them what your work entails, if you were feeling really talkative and generous that day?

I’d tell them I am a technology coach, and most people are like, ‘What is that?’ Because these are kind of new positions that have emerged. And then I explain that I go into classrooms and help teachers use technology, to make classrooms more engaging. I also order technology for the teachers and for the students — physical technology as well as learning apps. I provide teachers with training on how to use that technology.

And then they ask more questions. If they said, ‘So you don't teach kids anymore?’ then I tell them about what I do with teaching young kids, too. My position is really unique because we have, in our district, an AR/VR immersive room, which I run and I create content for when I have downtime. It’s the first of its kind in a K-12 building in the whole country, and it's open for our K-12 students. It’s this room with three big walls with projectors that become interactive to the touch and with surround sound. The floor is also interactive. It's like virtual reality without the goggles.

If I didn’t have that immersive room, I would probably miss being in the classroom, because I went to school to be a teacher. And I like that part, the teaching aspect.

When did the immersive room open in your district? And what are you teaching kids in that setting? What does that look like?

The immersive room was an initiative for the district right after the pandemic. They were brainstorming ideas on how to get kids to come back to school after such a long period of time away.

So far it has accomplished that goal. We’re a rural community. We don't have that much funding, and our kids come from very poor homes and backgrounds. A lot of children have never been to a museum, never been to cool places in the big city. With the immersive room, basically we can recreate any of that.

We can take a field trip to the deepest part of the ocean, for example. I have this one immersive experience that starts on the surface of the ocean and then lowers depending on what part of the ocean you want to visit. If you want to go to the part where the coral reefs are, or if you want to go to the deep part of the ocean where it's dark and no light gets through, you can do that. And then once we are there, in the ocean, the buttons are interactive in the walls and the children take turns touching those buttons, which gives them information about the specific aspect of the ocean. So the kids come and they get to touch the walls and interact and learn that way. And the room also has this four-dimensional aspect. If I want to bring a seashore scent into this experience, I can upload that so they can smell like they're right there in the ocean. And there's also fans that can activate and recreate different wind variance.

So that's what makes the lesson more interactive. We have other lessons to go to the moon, where we play with the gravity of the moon. There's bricks that they pull with their hands, and they fall and it simulates gravity. And then we talk about gravity. ‘What happens if we throw this brick right here on earth? How fast would that go? And look what happens if we throw this brick on the moon and how much slower it goes down.’ Then we’ll learn about the phases of the moon, how the moon interacts with the oceans and how that influences us and our daily lives on earth. This is what makes it really cool for the students.

That sounds incredible. I've never heard of anything like that. And you’re saying you teach all grade levels in the immersive room?

Yes, right now, but the way it works is the teachers schedule time with me and they bring the kids. The teachers are there in the classroom with me also. When they sign up, they give me an idea of what they expect to see in the immersive room. And then when they come, I have the lesson ready and the moment they walk in, boom, they are immersed in the lesson. That's what I like about the system.

What does a hard day look like in your role?

Sometimes, I have to make sure that rostering is OK. That means I have to spend the whole day fixing data and correcting names of students and making sure that everything is properly entered in the system and that students have access to their devices. And I have literally spent days repetitively deleting duplicate students. I guess that would be a hard day, just the monotonous work. I like variety.

What does a really good day look like?

A great day for me is when I get to do a little bit of everything: when I get to see the students, when I get to teach at least one class, when I get to interact with the teachers, helping them brainstorm ideas on how can we include students in this learning process with an app, and when I get to do some purchases too on that day, for some things that the teachers really need.

It just fills my heart when I am able to advocate for them because I tell them, ‘I like to do for you what nobody did for me when I was a teacher.’ Nobody will come and say, ‘What do you need? How are things going?’ I like to do that on a daily basis. If I find myself with the downtime, I don't stay here at my desk. I walk and I go to the other buildings, and it’s like, ‘Oh, Miguel, by the way,’ and then they need me for something. I get to interact with the principal. I get lots of hugs when I go to the lower elementary with the younger kids, like kindergarten to second grade.

So I guess a fulfilling day for me would be when I get to serve all of my clients — and in my job, my clients are students, teachers, admin, and anyone who is walking through this building — and when I get to make their lives better, a little bit lighter.

What is an unexpected way that your role shapes the day for kids?

One way is all the educational apps that they use on a daily basis. If something goes wrong with it, they call me. But if everything is running smoothly, it’s because of the job I do. I guess that's where my job gets taken for granted, when everything is running smoothly, everything is in place. We use tons of different learning apps — from Google Classroom to Clever — and I'm the person responsible for rostering them and then training the teachers.

What do you wish you could change about your school or the education system today?

I wish that the teaching profession would be more respected, that teachers would be able to get all the resources they need and the support that they need. I wish the politicians would put more money where their mouth is. Teachers are underappreciated. I wish that our society would realize that without teachers, there are no other careers. There's no doctors, there's no lawyers, there's no politicians — without teachers.

Also one of the things that I wish we could change is that we expect all students to have the same credits. In Michigan, if you want to graduate high school, you have to have three science credits, four social studies credits, four ELA. Everyone has to have the same. And I think that's seriously wrong because not all kids are the same. Everybody has different needs, everybody has different dreams, everybody has different backgrounds. We should provide students with a variety of choices.

Like OK, imagine this kid who is terrible at reading and he hates social studies, but he's a hands-on kind of kid and he likes to take things apart. Why not provide a path for this kid where he will get to graduate with a high school diploma and with skills on how to do the particular job that the kid wants?

Your role gives you unique access and insight to today's young people. What's one thing you've learned about them through your work?

I’ve learned about how life is a lot simpler in a kid’s mind, and they know the joy of living day to day. When a kid comes and gives you a hug, they really mean it. When they give you a high five, it's because they want to do that. I am touched by the sincerity of the kids and how many times they teach us that life can be fun, life is fun.

Before I became a teacher, I was doing youth ministry and I was recruiting this kid, this young man, and I was like, ‘Hey, I have some fun programs at the church. Come and join us.’ He looked at me and said, ‘What kind of fun? Your kind of fun, or my kind of fun?’ I said, ‘That is an absolutely great question.’

That kid kind of changed my life because when I became a teacher, I always kept that in mind. Still to this day, that echoes in my head: ‘What kind of fun? Is it your kind of fun, or my kind of fun?’ Learning does not have to be boring. It should be fun. And that was my passion, to make learning fun for the students, to the point that they don't realize that they are learning because they're having too much fun.

That's what I like about students. Sometimes they can challenge you, they can ask you questions, and if you listen to them, we can learn a lot from young kids. I have learned a lot from them.

How Creative Technology Can Help Students Take on the Future

Abbie Misha — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 09:55:00 -0700

Today’s students will enter careers that haven’t even been imagined yet. With AI and automation reshaping entire industries, the skills employers once valued are being overtaken by the need for creativity, adaptability and technological fluency. But how can schools equip students with these essential competencies?

Brian Johnsrud
Director of Education Learning and Advocacy, Adobe

To explore this challenge, EdSurge sat down with Brian Johnsrud, the director of education learning and advocacy at Adobe. He shares insights into how schools can leverage creative tools to equip students with the skills they’ll need to thrive in a world where the only constant is change. Adobe, known for its cutting-edge creative and digital literacy tools, is paving the way for a new approach to education — one that blends technical expertise with the soft skills that will define the workforce of tomorrow.

EdSurge: How can educators prepare students for the future workforce and foster in-demand skills such as creativity and adaptability?

Johnsrud: Educators can stay informed about future workforce trends, including emerging jobs and highly sought-after skills. School leaders are increasingly turning to organizations like the World Economic Forum and analyzing data on the most in-demand skills for the next five years. This allows them to prepare students for future needs, even if the current curriculum doesn't yet demand those skills.

Employers increasingly recognize that, while hiring someone with the exact skills needed for a job today is great, those needs will change in a couple of years. The real question is whether the person is a lifelong learner — someone who can self-learn and adapt when the landscape shifts — and whether they possess the resilience, flexibility and agility to thrive in a world and industry that is constantly evolving.

— Brian Johnsrud

The latest World Economic Forum Jobs Report highlights the top skills that will rise in importance by 2027. Creative thinking leads the list, followed by analytical or critical thinking. The third most important skill is technological literacy, which includes AI and other technologies. Interestingly, the fourth is curiosity and lifelong learning, and the fifth is resilience, flexibility and agility.

What does this shift in skill demands mean for employers and job seekers?

These skills really highlight the skilling revolution we’re facing. Employers increasingly recognize that, while hiring someone with the exact skills needed for a job today is great, those needs will change in a couple of years. The real question is whether the person is a lifelong learner — someone who can self-learn and adapt when the landscape shifts — and whether they possess the resilience, flexibility and agility to thrive in a world and industry that is constantly evolving.

How can creative tools help students develop both technical and soft skills needed for future careers?

One approach is training students on industry-standard tools to familiarize them with what they'll use in the workplace. It’s also important to equip them with professional-quality templates and assets so that the projects they’re creating actually look like professional outputs. Pedagogically, this approach is real-world, authentic, project-based learning. Instead of creating something that only makes sense in a classroom, let’s give them real, authentic projects to work on.

Collaboration is also the future of work, and any creative tool that has built-in collaboration features provides opportunities for students to not just create but to co-create with others, share feedback and exchange ideas.

How can educators choose the right tools to foster creativity in the classroom?

Choose tools that offer both a low floor and a high ceiling, like Adobe Express for Education. This means providing entry points that allow anyone to begin creating, regardless of their starting point. The high ceiling comes into play as you move from Adobe Express all the way to Creative Cloud; you never outgrow our creative tools.

It’s all about giving teachers the tools to teach effectively and students the means to show off their skills to colleges and employers. That’s what makes a creative tool truly valuable in education.

— Johnsrud

Also, addressing creative confidence is essential, as it often poses a significant barrier for students. Many students think, “I’m not creative; I don’t know if I can design something that looks great.” The fear of the blank canvas is real and can be daunting. Teachers can help by providing professional-looking templates that allow students to focus on content rather than starting from scratch.

What makes a tool truly valuable in education?

A tool’s real value in the classroom goes way beyond its features. It’s about having the right content, support and resources to help everyone use it effectively. Take Adobe Express for Education, for example. We’ve loaded it with free lesson plans and resources for teachers, plus a learn tab with videos and guided activities for students to practice on their own. And when it comes to proving what they’ve learned, students can take Adobe Certified Professional exams — we’ve been offering these for 17 years and have issued over 1.8 million certifications.

It’s all about giving teachers the tools to teach effectively and students the means to show off their skills to colleges and employers. That’s what makes a creative tool truly valuable in education.

How does AI factor into creative education?

AI plays a significant role in enhancing this creativity. It can assist in brainstorming and rapid iteration, helping students quickly generate various ideas and alternatives. AI also helps students step back from routine tasks to see the bigger picture.

Traditional education has often taught students to swim in a controlled pool. With AI, we’re teaching them to surf in an ever-changing ocean. It’s not just about repetition and efficiency; it’s about adapting to shifting conditions and engaging in creative thinking. AI acts as a surfboard, enabling students to navigate change and thrive in an unpredictable world.

— Johnsrud

In this sense, traditional education has often taught students to swim in a controlled pool. With AI, we’re teaching them to surf in an ever-changing ocean. It’s not just about repetition and efficiency; it’s about adapting to shifting conditions and engaging in creative thinking. AI acts as a surfboard, enabling students to navigate change and thrive in an unpredictable world.

How is AI changing teaching and learning strategies?

Traditionally, education has focused on teaching students to perform specific tasks. However, as AI increasingly automates many of these tasks, our educational focus needs to shift. I believe the next focus should be on understanding context — knowing which tasks to perform, when to perform them and why.

As task execution becomes easier, grasping the broader context of these tasks will be increasingly valuable. Understanding context is a crucial human skill that is best taught through storytelling and real-world applications.

English language arts and history teachers have long excelled at teaching context by helping students understand the background and culture surrounding texts or historical events. This broader perspective, while not commonly emphasized outside these subjects, is becoming essential across all disciplines.

By mastering storytelling and contextual understanding, students can see the bigger picture in complex situations, understand how individual tasks contribute to larger goals, develop creative solutions to multifaceted problems and adapt more readily to changing circumstances in their future careers.

College Students Are Doing Less Homework. Should Instructors Change How They Assign It?

Maggie Hicks — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 02:40:00 -0700

Encouraging students to complete work outside of class has always been a struggle.

But many college professors say it has gotten even harder in recent years as students prioritize their mental health, have trouble adhering to deadlines and are more skeptical of the purpose of homework.

One cause is the pandemic, and how it disrupted middle and high school for today’s traditional-aged college students. Students who spent formative years learning online may be too nervous to raise a hand in class or have trouble paying attention. With the flexibility that came with pandemic-era school, they’re not used to firm deadlines or strict grading.

Today’s students also report greater mental health struggles, which some experts attribute to excessive social media use.

Then there’s the sudden temptation of ChatGPT and other new AI tools, which can make cheating on assignments easy and often undetectable.

Together, these factors have brewed a “perfect storm” of challenges keeping students from doing homework, says Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago, students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm doing a thing because she told me to do it. I think there's less willingness to just do the thing because somebody told you to do it.”

— Sarah Z. Johnson, a writing instructor and chair of the writing center at Madison Colleg

“It all sort of feels bundled together,” Cohn says. “This is a sequence of events where learning and environments for learning just feel harder and harder to cultivate.”

But complaining about students isn’t the answer, Cohn and other teaching experts say.

Instead, college instructors need to change how they assign and communicate their homework assignments. And they argue that teachers at the college level should now essentially teach the study skills that students might not have learned in school before arriving on campuses.

Teaching The Why

Sarah Z. Johnson, a writing instructor and chair of the writing center at Madison College, has noticed that many of her students have a much lower tolerance for routine assignments, some of which they see as busy work.

She often has to explain to students that her assignments will build the skills for the work they’ll do later in the year. She says that helps convince students that doing the work now will help them later. And if a student doesn’t think an assignment is worth doing, they’re much less likely to do it at all, she says.

“Maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago, students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm doing a thing because she told me to do it,’” Johnson says. “I think there's less willingness to just do the thing because somebody told you to do it.”

As more students focus on prioritizing their mental health, they’re intentionally choosing not to complete work if it keeps them from taking care of themselves, says Jessie Beckett, the director of Radford University’s learning center, otherwise they won’t feel motivated to get it done. A student may think an assignment isn’t as important, and choose to get more sleep or spend time with friends instead, she says.

While Beckett is glad students are making their health a priority, she adds that they still need to learn to find a balance. Some students don’t understand how important assignments are, Beckett says. If an instructor doesn’t explain the outcomes of a homework task, many students will assume that it’s not as important, she argues, and miss out on learning a skill they’ll need later on.

“They don't necessarily understand what the value of something is, how it translates to a grade, how it translates to their success in that class, how it translates to a skill that will impact their success in future classes or in their major,” Beckett says.

Lily Martens, an undergraduate at Madison College, recalls an assignment in her environmental science class when students were asked to go to a park and take notes about the nature in the area. A few weeks later, the students went back to the same park and noted the difference in the animals and plant life.

That kind of assignment feels more purposeful than completing a worksheet or answering questions from a textbook, she says. “Not only was I learning about what species might be in the local area,” she adds, “but it was also teaching me how to record that and that was really awesome.”

Instructors need to show their students how an assignment will help them grow, says Darren Minarik, an associate professor at Radford University focused on special education and social studies education.

In his classes, Minarik often teaches his students, who are studying to become K-12 educators, to model the purpose of an assignment in class. For instance, they could assign a quiz that allows students to use their homework to see how the skills they’re learning will translate into class objectives.

This will “show that there's a direct connection between the assignment that you're asking to do outside of class and then how they're going to be graded in class,” Minarik says. “So being open about ‘this is why I'm asking you to do it.’”

Many professors don’t go through the same training in how to teach that K-12 classroom teachers get, Minarik says, so they don’t realize how important it is to explain to students the purpose of doing their work. In some cases college instructors assign multiple readings about the same idea, which can feel redundant to students. From the perspective of the faculty expert, it might all be fascinating, Cohn says, but to students it can feel gratuitous.

Cohn encourages instructors to determine what skills they want their students to gain from a class and then review their assignments to consider how each one will help reach those goals. Often, instructors will realize that instead of assigning three long texts, they may only need to give students one key reading, she says.

“I've tried to help faculty think about, ‘What are you gonna have students do with this? Are they gonna need this assignment to be able to solve a problem down the road? Is it essential by the end of the term? Are they going to need to do this reading in order to write something later or conduct research later?’” Cohn says. Faculty need to clearly answer these questions in their syllabi so students will know, “here's what you do with this information and here's why it'll matter to you in your class,” she adds.

Bad Habits

Aside from questioning the purpose of homework, many students also have more difficulty keeping up with deadlines.

In the past, Amanda Flint, a math instructor at Madison College, assigned her students homework that would be due at the end of each week. But many students began waiting until the day it was due, and then they couldn’t get everything done on time, she says.

Students picked up those habits during the pandemic, when teachers tended to be more relaxed about deadlines, allowing students to have extensions or not enforcing them at all, says Beckett. When those students got to college, they assumed they’d be able to finish all of their work late without any consequences.

In many K-12 schools, “students have regular check-ins around how they're doing and opportunities to quickly submit all of the work before that grading period ends, even if that work was assigned or was considered due weeks prior,” Beckett says. While the effort to be more flexible has good intentions, making the switch to stricter rules is challenging for students when they get to college, she adds.

Martens, the Madison student, says the flexibility also makes assignments seem less important, leading students to feel less inclined to do them. Often routine textbook readings aren’t graded, she says, so a student likely won’t prioritize it. Even though she feels like this can put her behind in class, it’s difficult to be motivated to complete an assignment that feels like busy work and won’t impact her grade.

In high school, her teachers often graded students’ notes from the textbook to ensure they were doing the reading, Martens says. Now, her instructors “just give it to you and they're like you should be reading, but they're not checking,” she says. “I miss things I’ve noticed in some classes, especially where it’s hard to cover everything in class.”

The issue seems especially pronounced at community colleges, where instructors may be teaching students who have to work multiple jobs and need to take up an extra shift instead of completing an assignment. Or, as the number of students in dual enrollment programs skyrockets, some instructors, like Flint, find themselves teaching mainly high school students who haven’t experienced a college workload yet.

To encourage better time management, Flint has begun adding multiple deadlines throughout the week. Instead of expecting students to complete all of their work by Friday, she assigns two or three sub-deadlines on smaller pieces of the work to help them get everything done in time.

She also gives each student 100 “late passes” per semester, which averages out to about two per assignment. Each late pass extends the deadline by 24 hours, so a student could hand in an assignment up to two days after the due date, she says. Or, if students save their late passes they could get even longer extensions on certain assignments. Students are then able to choose when during the semester they may need more time without falling too far behind, she says.

“Instead of assuming that the student's gonna do that scheduling on their own,” Flint says, “I turned it into the other direction, which is ‘You've got due dates, but you've got the wiggle room to move it if you need to.’”

Johnson has also noticed that students are more likely these days to simply give up on assignments they find difficult.

In the past, she would assign works by Geoffrey Chaucer in her British literature classes. Now students would likely find his writing too difficult to understand on their own. “I think they figure if they're struggling this much, they must be doing it wrong,” Johnson adds. “So they quit.”

Since K-12 schools are required to follow standardized curriculums, Beckett says students start to think there is only one way to learn something, and if they aren’t good at it, they must not be good at that subject.

As a writing instructor, “I saw a lot of students who would dread coming to a writing class and would put off their work for a writing class readily because they had so much fear or anxiety around being able to do it well,” she says. Those issues aren’t unique to the pandemic or this generation of students, though, Beckett says. “Any student who has had a negative experience around their abilities or confidence in a particular subject is going to be less likely to prioritize that subject,” she adds.

College professors often don’t realize how complicated their assignments can be, Cohn says, or they don’t remember what it was like to first learn the material. Textbooks may use jargon that an expert in the field will understand, but a student new to the topic wouldn’t, she says. She encourages instructors to guide students through a reading by having them answer questions about specific concepts they most need to understand.

Minarik also teaches his students to craft lessons that will demonstrate how to be a good learner.

If a teacher expects students to take copious notes in class, they need to teach their students optimal note-taking practices, he says. They also need to teach how to study, and how to complete homework assignments, he says. They can’t expect students to know any of that right away, he adds.

“If you want an outcome, you need to model how to get to that outcome for your students,” he says.

From the student perspective, Martens says she has a tough time completing assignments when she starts them at home and realizes she didn’t understand what she learned in class as well as she thought. Offering multiple deadlines is helpful, she says — especially with essays — since she can get help on her rough draft and feel more confident about the final one. She also appreciates when a professor leaves time near the end of class for students to start their homework and ask questions if they need help.

The classes Martens is often most engaged in, though, are the ones where she can tell the professor cares deeply about a subject and is engaged with the class, she says. Despite not enjoying English much, when Martens took one of Johnson’s classes, she could tell how excited the professor was to teach the subject, something she says she saw less of in her high school classes after the pandemic.

“All of a sudden I was excited to write essays because Sarah was just like, so excited to talk about writing essays,” Martens says. “That was one of my favorite classes.”

How To Make Someone Not Hate Math

Daniel Mollenkamp — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Steve Holifield’s breathing was labored.

A respected math teacher at a K-12 public charter school in Apple Valley, California, Holifield was in steep physical decline.

His students had watched the effects of his disease creep across his body. At first, he stumbled and, his hands weak, relied entirely on teaching assistants to write equations on the board for him. Then, his voice became so feeble he could only be heard with a helpful boost from a microphone. It also amplified his strained breathing and its halting rhythm.

“The biggest core memory for me from Holifield’s class is the sound of his heavy breathing, where he would just, like, stop for a good 10 seconds,” Christina Lynn Wallace, a student of his, says more than a decade later. “We just wouldn't hear him take a breath, and then he'd start again and [we’d] be like, ‘Holy shit. Is he gonna die in our classroom?’”

The school put on a festival to fundraise for medical bills resulting from his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. But within a short span, Holifield would be dead.

As the U.S. struggles with math instruction, there’s interest in cultural perceptions about who possesses strong math abilities. The concept that certain people are “bad at math” has come in for criticism as racist, sexist, classist, heritable and inaccurate. It’s of particular concern for reinforcing inequality in lucrative and vital science, technology, engineering and math careers, since the classification can knock students off the path to those positions. Of course, people also apply the label to themselves, too, thanks to both internal and external factors.

Holifield’s demise became a well-known tragedy in the High Desert, a patch of California desert about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where he taught at the Academy for Academic Excellence, in part because Holifield was esteemed as a devoted math teacher.

More than a decade later, I tracked down several of his former students. The lesson I learned: A good teacher seems to make a big difference in how students view their math potential and whether they embrace the “not-mathy” label.

Bedtime Equations

I struck out to interview former students of Holifield after becoming EdSurge’s resident math reporter over the past several years.

Frequently, when I interviewed experts about why math students around the country are struggling, those experts would comment that part of the problem lay in the culture. It’s common for anyone, even teachers, to boast that they aren’t a “math person,” in a way that nobody would proudly proclaim about reading, sources explained. In my favorite phrasing of that view: It’s common for parents — no matter their level of education — to take pride in reading bedtime stories to their children. We don’t have to be convinced it’s important because we intuitively feel that it is. But how many parents are performing bedtime equations?

For a long time, I would have said I wasn’t a math person either. Reflecting on my own self-identification, I had a vague sense it had something to do with Holifield’s Algebra II class, which I took in ninth grade. That year, the class watched as his body was ravaged by ALS, and he was replaced, in at least one class, by a substitute teacher who came out of retirement and who didn’t understand the math. I wasn’t particularly mathy before then, but after that, math and I had a no-contact policy that would only reverse late in my college career when I became interested in economics and statistics.

But in checking my memory against others as part of this reporting process, another narrative emerged.

Holifield’s ordeal had not seemed to push many students away from math. The opposite: Holifield himself seemed to have a talent for connecting with students, according to the half-dozen former students I interviewed. That was true even — or perhaps especially — when they didn’t think of themselves as “math people.”

“He was a whole person,” says Natalie Snyder, a teacher’s assistant for Holifield shortly before his death. He was skilled at building relationships with students that pulled them into math, regardless of whether they identified as skilled in manipulating numbers, she says.

And even when Holifield was suddenly dying from ALS, that remained true, she adds.

For Wallace, who remembered his stuttering breaths, Holifield’s decline was upsetting. “I was friends with his daughter, Brianna, so I'm sitting here watching her dad die in front of me,” she says. But that upset didn’t necessarily transfer onto math. “It was traumatic, but not from a scholastic perspective,” she says.

That self-perception was deeper and older. Wallace was a non-math person already by the time she took his class, she says.

Wallace has a good memory for numbers, she says. She can recall her debit card number or the security code to a place she stayed a week back, showing that her brain isn’t allergic to numbers. But identifying as a “non-math” person gives her an out for when she feels insecure about solving a math equation. She’s slow with math, she adds, but she’s also a slow reader. While she’s never “felt convicted” about not liking math, she would feel embarrassed about not being a reader, she says.

So revisiting this episode, what most sticks out is that Holifield’s admiring students still felt pulled in by his magnetism. Their own feelings about math could be influenced by a teacher. But they came from somewhere deeper.

This appeared to be true of my own experience, once the memories were knocked loose. My math phobia was older, if originally more mild. Like in many other cases, it was born of a feedback loop. Debilitating anxiety and poor math performance both obstruct learning, a pattern that was set by the time I reached Holifield’s class. In early middle school, by the time my parents struggled to assist with math homework, I began to compare myself to my maternal grandfather, Aladdin Perkins, a retired electrical engineer who had little patience for dullards. When I once asked him to explain a problem to me, I was in awe. It seemed as though the math poured out of him like a sieve. I figured I was slow in math, and I’d have to look elsewhere to flourish. Less attention to math meant average scores and more distaste for the subject, which never felt practical to me anyway.

In the most common way to understand the phenomenon, worrying about math causes a student to avoid it and therefore slows down their improvement in math, according to Colleen Ganley, an associate professor of developmental psychology at Florida State University. Meanwhile, poor performance feeds the developing anxiety.

So how does someone become a non-math person? People tend to get pushed away from math during adolescence or college, says Dana Miller-Cotto, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Education. Until third or fourth grade most children see themselves as a math person, she says. Younger children tend to overestimate their ability, but by that time they start to compare themselves to others. That’s about the time that the “implicit messages” those students receive from parents and teachers — who may respond more favorably to some students than others by, say, calling on some more often, or who may express a distaste for math — tend to take hold, she says.

But in a sense, American culture values qualities it affiliates with math too much. For some reason, it’s a common belief that everyone who goes into fields such as math, economics or computer science is brilliant, probably in part because those fields are financially rewarding, Miller-Cotto says. Some students seem to pick up a misconception that math is a knack instead of a process, she adds. Those who go into these high-paying fields must be inherently smart. It goes along with a belief that being good at math means you get every answer correct, she says. It’s as if those people were born with a calculator in their head, rather than simply being engaged in performing math a lot.

Ultimately, that seems to push away students — especially women and Black students — by making them feel they don’t belong to the “math community,” Miller-Cotto says.

But what about how students think about themselves? Some studies have suggested that how well a student does in math indirectly affects whether they see themselves as competent in it. What really matters, in this view, is how interested they are in math and how much external recognition they get.

Miller-Cotto suggests that teachers have a lot of influence. It’s important to ensure messages or opportunities to engage in math are equal for everyone they teach, she says. It’s not about telling every student they are a math person, she says, but in finding ways to engage students more.

Using this view, according to his former students, Holifield was an expert at generating interest and giving validation.

But for his students, the shelf-life of that interest varied.

Tracking Math Identities

Snyder, Holifield’s former teaching assistant, says she identifies as a non-math person. By the time she reached fourth grade, she perceived herself as having “weak” math skills. Part of the problem was that she hadn’t memorized her times tables, which made her feel slow in math class.

That caused insecurity, she says.

Still, Holifield helped make math practical for her when she took Algebra II with him, she says. He explained how math was useful for real jobs, such as those who test the level of land for construction or create maps, and how as students they could already perform that math. It was fun, she recalls. But more than that, he was attentive and made her feel that math was valuable.

But a case of “senioritis” caused her to drop out of high school calculus. In college, she had limited exposure to math. She started studying organic chemistry but became overwhelmed, and she stopped out of higher ed altogether. She later picked up a degree in public administration from Chico State, a four-year university in California.

Felisha Cullum had a favorable view of her math talent.

Cullum took Algebra II and trigonometry with Holifield, who even helped her to become a math tutor, one of her first jobs. She started calculus, but that was the “year he got really bad,” and the class was switched over part-way through to another teacher, once he was medically retired.

Cullum dropped out of calculus after that semester. Eventually, she picked up a graduate degree in clinical mental health counseling from George Fox University, a private Christian college in Oregon, and now works as a play therapy program instructor.

Another former teacher’s assistant, Kreddow Feskens, went further in her math journey. She describes herself as a “math brain.”

Feskens actually declared herself a math major in college. She says that was because of Holifield’s influence. She had taken Algebra I, Algebra II and calculus with him. With the benefit of years of reflection, she says that her interest in math came not from her own innate talent with numbers but from his encouragement. She grew up in a strict household where performing your best was crucial, and Holifield was encouraging and lighthearted and always made her feel like she was her best self, she says.

But the Holifield effect wore off, and Feskens switched her major from math to business, because she thought it would be more practical. These days, she’s a recruiter, and she no longer would describe herself as a math person per se. She thrives with algebra or calculus still, the classes she had Holifield for, but she can struggle with simpler math.

As a former student of Holifield and now a journalist who covers math, I was hit by how responsive people’s beliefs about themselves seem to be. Without encouragement from a gifted teacher, even those who were prone to like math got pulled away from it. Once they were, the identity set in, making it harder to go back to learning math.

Nevertheless, they look back fondly on Holifield.

As an adult, Feskens says she hopes Holifield understood the depth of his impact. She helped organize the school's fundraising event when his disease became advanced, called “Holifalooza.” They didn’t raise much money — perhaps $100 or so — she recalls, but she hopes it left an impression on the man.

“I wish more people were able to experience his teaching,” she says, “and I wish there were more teachers like him.”

A Teaching Mentor Once Told Me: ‘Our Ancestors Want Us to Rest’

Edgar Miguel Grajeda — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

My colleagues, friends and family often praise my relentless pursuit of excellence, especially in my teaching career. But what they don’t always see is the weight behind that drive — the pressure I feel to prove myself and the deep sense of responsibility I feel to create systemic change for my students. Even after surpassing many of my professional goals, an unsettling feeling lingers — a persistent voice telling me that it’s still not enough. That burden, I carry quietly, and often alone.

My journey into teaching was born from a deep-seated curiosity about the transformative power of education and a drive for social justice. To create the change I envisioned, I focused on becoming the best teacher I could be. From the start, I was never content with just meeting expectations — I was determined to surpass them. I’ve earned two master’s degrees, received a Fulbright scholarship and participated in several prestigious education fellowships. However, these achievements, while significant, never seem to quiet the internal voice that insists on pushing for the next big thing.

I’ve come to realize that this restlessness and the pressures I place on myself are not just personal quirks, but are deeply intertwined with my identity as a formerly undocumented student and now a first-generation Latinx professional. My identity, coupled with the ever-present shadow of negative stereotypes about Latino families not valuing education, has driven me to constantly prove, to others and to myself, that I am worthy of being a teacher and capable of helping my students thrive. This feeling has become consuming and has contributed to mounting anxiety and the early stages of burnout. Yet, this drive has been a double-edged sword. It has also led me to feel empowered and proud, knowing that I can make a meaningful difference in the lives of my students. Teaching brings me immense joy and a deep sense of purpose, reminding me why I chose this path in the first place.

This realization has left me wondering how I, as an educator of color, can navigate the pressure I feel to overachieve, while maintaining a healthy relationship with my identity, my work and my well-being?

Reflecting on the stress I feel, I am brought back to my own experiences navigating the American K-12 system as an immigrant student. My family immigrated to the United States from Guadalajara, Mexico when I was 11 years old, and my memories of schooling in America are colored by episodes of anxiety and shame. I was often made to feel inferior by peers and sometimes even teachers because of my parents' level of formal education, my struggles with language acquisition, and the reality that I came from a working-class family.

Even more troubling were the instances of discrimination I faced from educators who lacked cultural competence — like the AP English teacher I had in my senior year of high school who told me I didn’t belong in his class because I had only been speaking English for a few years or the counselor who, when I confided in her about my undocumented status while seeking help with college applications, dismissed me outright, admitting she didn't know how to assist me and making no effort to find a solution.

These experiences left me feeling like a traveler on a dark road, with nothing to light the way. The lack of Latino male role models in my own K-12 education only compounded this sense of isolation. Despite attending high school in Los Angeles County, which has a diverse population including 49 percent of residents who identify as Hispanic / Latino, I never had a Latino male teacher.

These formative experiences were pivotal in my decision to become a teacher. I entered the profession with a burning desire to counteract the negativity I had encountered, to help my students discover their potential, and to serve as a positive role model for them. Today, I teach at an elementary school where more than 65 percent of the students identify as Hispanic / Latino. Teaching them is an immense privilege, one that I do not take lightly. I am acutely aware that Latino students, who are so often underserved by the education system, deserve a teacher who goes above and beyond for them. This awareness contributes to the weight I feel — pressure to be the perfect teacher, to shatter stereotypes and to prove that as an immigrant and an English language learner, I am good enough.

One of the greatest challenges I face as an educator is that the very qualities that drive me to succeed — my work ethic, my ambition, my desire to create systemic change — are also the ones that have led me down a path of anxiety and burnout. Throughout my career, I have seen many teachers leave the profession, worn down by the demands of the job and the lack of recognition. I believed that the key to avoiding this fate was to focus on growth and impact. I set my sights on leadership roles. I sacrificed sleep, leisure, and, at times, my health, all in the name of becoming the best version of myself so I could serve my students and for the community I represent.

Recently, I found myself at a breaking point. The end of the last school year brought with it a wave of anxiety that I could no longer ignore. Despite the accolades and accomplishments, I still felt like an impostor, plagued by the thought that my success was due to luck rather than hard work. My ambitions began to feel like a checklist, devoid of the passion that had once fueled them. As the school year drew to a close, I realized that I needed to step back and reassess. I had been chasing the approval of others, trying to prove my worth, when in reality, I was responding to the deeply ingrained stereotype threats that had followed me throughout my life.

Recognizing this turning point, I pressed pause and carved out some time to reflect. This summer, I allowed myself to rest — to step back from constantly trying to achieve and instead, created space to reconnect with myself. I traveled back to Mexico and spent my days journaling and meditating in nature. Reflecting on my journey, I remembered my "why" and my joy of teaching. I started to practice gratitude by acknowledging my efforts and accepting that it's okay to take a break sometimes. I reached out to friends, family, my partner and mentors, and talked to them about some of the stress I was feeling. Most importantly, I allowed myself to relax and have fun.

Edgar Grajeda in Mexico. Courtesy of Edgar Grajeda.

When I got home, I thought a lot about the power of pressing pause and considered the lessons I’d learned. By giving myself permission to engage in joyful experiences myself, I felt better able to model the importance of joy for my students. By reconnecting with my passion for teaching, I felt well positioned to demonstrate a deep love of learning for them. And for myself, I began to understand that I did not need to prove my intelligence or worth to anyone. I have always been enough. My strength does not lie in the titles I hold or the awards I accumulate, but in my ability to practice radical self-love and acceptance.

As I started school this fall, I’ve carried these lessons with me. I’ve reminded myself that I am no longer an immigrant student struggling to prove his worth in the classroom. I am now a teacher who models for my students the importance of embracing their humanity, feeling confident in their identity, and celebrating their accomplishments without fear of judgment.

A mentor once shared with me a piece of wisdom that has stayed with me: “Our ancestors want us to rest.” These words resonated deeply, reminding me of the importance of balance in life. As educators, we often preach the value of work-life balance, yet we frequently fail to apply this wisdom to ourselves. We let our aspirations overshadow our need for self-care, but that is unsustainable.

On my trip, I had a moment when it all came together for me. As I sat on my hotel balcony, overlooking the mountains in Oaxaca as the sun set, I finally understood the importance of rest. I have achieved much, but my greatest area of growth has been learning to value myself, not for what I can accomplish, but for who I am. In doing so, I hope to inspire my students to do the same.

For Latino Students, the Fear of Being Left Behind in AI and STEM Jobs

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 01:00:00 -0700

Latino children make up one of the fastest-growing demographics in K-12 education. Yet few are likely to grow up and establish careers in technology. For them, there’s obviously a leak somewhere in the school-to-jobs pipeline.

Just one in 10 tech workers are Latino, and while Latino college students are choosing STEM fields in college more frequently, they earn only about 12 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Federal data shows that K-12 schools with high percentages of Hispanic students offer fewer STEM courses than schools with lower proportions of Hispanic kids.

Reporter Nadia Tamez-Robledo recently moderated a panel of tech experts at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual conference to talk about why Latinos are still lagging in science education and what it’s going to take to make sure they don’t get left behind — particularly in the fast-growing AI industry. Read the top takeaways below.

Why Is Increasing Latinos in STEM Important?

Diana Logreira is web program manager at the NASA Science Mission Directorate, which studies Earth from space. She said the organization is trying to increase Latino interest in science through initiatives like a partnership with Arizona State University to create K-12 science activities, and the effort is part of their overall mission to drive innovation.

“We need to involve more underrepresented communities in our programs and missions and our research, so what we've been doing is trying to figure out how we can plug in our content into those communities,” Logreira said. “For us, innovation is a must, and there is a lot of research that shows that diversity is related and connected to the efficiency of innovation and scientific discovery.”

Maria Guedez is senior vice president of business development and technology at Denbury, an oil and gas company owned by Exxon Mobil. She said that with Latinos making up 20 percent of college students, they are the company’s future workforce. She believes they will help it both continue to be an energy provider and leverage technology to combat climate change.

“Making sure they understand, that they see themselves reflected in the space and in the possibilities of how they can play a role [is important],” Guedez said. “At Exxon Mobil, we've been committed for many years to feeding that pipeline.”

She said that industry partnerships with schools will be “critical” to increasing the share of Latinos entering science and technology jobs, and one way her company does that is by sending its own scientists to do demonstrations in schools. Part of the goal is to broaden what types of careers students can pursue in the sciences.

“They think of it in a very narrow sense, and sometimes they don't have a reference point of what that looks like,” Guedez said. “They might not have anybody in their families or in their circle that have been in STEM careers, so [school partnerships are] bridging that representation and providing an opportunity for them to see what it actually means to take a career in engineering, math, science.”

Noel Candelaria, secretary-treasurer of the National Education Association, pointed to statistics that show Latinos accounted for more than 90 percent of U.S. population growth since the start of the pandemic, and that they will make up 78 percent of new workers by 2030. Those figures are reasons why Latino students need to be engaged in tech classes and career pathways, he explained.

“We want to make sure that the new workforce is in advanced technologies,” Candelaria said, “not just the service industry — [in] which we have been pigeonholed as a community for decades — but that we're actually the ones that are leading in this space.”

What Are the Challenges to Increasing Latinos in STEM?

Isabella Elvir-Ray, program management director at Salesforce, said one of the steps to advancing Latinos in technology is to change the way the community thinks about artificial intelligence.

“When we hear the word AI, most of us fear it,” Elvir-Ray said. “How do we remove that fear out of AI — the sense that it will replace humans?”

In her experience, young Latinos like her 14-year-old son are excited about AI and want opportunities to use it in school. That enthusiasm should be tapped.

“I think that is the topic of this conversation: How do we merge technologies into our educational system for the underrepresented minorities?” Elvir-Ray said. “Especially [encouraging] our Latino community to embrace these technologies, because they have embraced these technologies at an early stage in their life.”

Candelaria said the National Education Association has published guidance on its website about “equitably and justly bringing AI into our schools, into our classrooms.” Schools still need expertise from industry professionals in their communities on how to ensure their students get the most out of the fast-growing technology.

“One thing that our members kept telling us for the last couple of years is, ‘This is here and now, and we need help,’” Candelaria said of artificial intelligence. That means help “making sure that we're looking at how we're bringing AI into the classrooms, making sure that we're adequately funding our public schools to not only have the software and the hardware, but the training that is needed by educators.”

Beyond having a roadmap for teaching AI content, Candelaria said that infrastructure, internet connectivity and attracting tech-savvy teachers are also major needs for ensuring that Latino students have STEM education options. It’s difficult to retrofit schools that are 100 years old for modern classrooms, he added, and rural students in particular need help with access to the internet at home.

“We're seeing record numbers of Latino students coming into our rural communities, a lot of them who are immigrating to this country for the very first time and don't have the [internet] infrastructure,” Candelaria said. “It doesn't help if we're able to connect our schools [but] we're not able to connect them in the community. If we're not doing that, then we're gonna be leaving all of our students behind, especially in Latino communities, who overwhelmingly — 90-plus percent of them — attend our public schools.”

The Need for Mentorship

Another theme that emerged from the panel was how mentorship played a role in the panelists’ journey into tech careers.

Guedez said she had a relative who worked in the oil and gas industry, and who told her about the type of careers that pursuing engineering could bring her. She’s had mentors throughout her nearly two decades at Exxon Mobil, including access to nearly 2,000 members of the company’s Latino employee group.

Elvir-Ray said that, as an undergrad, she chose a degree in information management systems “because I had said to myself, ‘I'm not smart enough to do [computer] programming.’” It was an unexpected opportunity to do an IT internship at Fannie Mae that changed her mentality.

“From that moment, I was hooked because I understood that being in IT wasn't only about programming,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can't just be in a corner typing code.’ I'm a social person, and what this internship showed me was that there were other types of careers in IT where you can deal with customers, you can deal with people.”

Logreira said she and other members of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Hispanic employee group volunteer their time to join their HR colleagues at conferences and campus visits where Latino students are going to be as part of increasing the visibility of Latinos in tech.

“We are trying to create that mentality that, ‘We can do it,’” Logreira said. “The fact that I'm here today, I have to say, somebody at some point realized that I had something to bring to the table.”

Inside an Effort to Build an AI Assistant for Designing Course Materials

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 05:20:55 -0700

There’s a push among AI developers to create an AI tutor, and some see that as a key use case for tools like ChatGPT. But one longtime edtech expert sees an even better fit for new AI chatbots in education: helping educators design course materials for their students.

So all year Michael Feldstein has been leading a project to build an AI assistant that’s focused on learning design.

After all, these days colleges and other education institutions are hiring a growing number of human instructional designers to help create or improve teaching materials — especially as colleges have developed more online classes and programs. And people in those roles follow a playbook for helping subject-matter experts (the teachers they work with) organize their material into a series of compelling learning activities that will get students the required knowledge and skills on a given subject. Feldstein thinks new AI chatbots might be uniquely suited to guiding instructors through the early stages of that learning-design process.

He calls his system the AI Learning Design Assistant, or ALDA. And for months he has been leading a series of workshops through which more than 70 educators have tried versions of the tool and given feedback. He says he’s built a new version of the system about every month for the past five months incorporating the input he’s received. He argues that if AI could serve as an effective instructional design assistant, it could help colleges significantly reduce the time it takes to create courses.

Feldstein is not completely convinced it will work, though, so he says he has invited plenty of people to test it who are skeptical of the idea.

“The question is, can AI do that?” he says. “Can we create an AI learning design assistant that interviews the human educator, asks the questions and gathers the information that the educator has in their heads about the important elements of the teaching interaction and then generates a first draft?”

EdSurge has been checking in with Feldstein over the past few months as he’s gone through this design process. And he’s shared what has gone well — and where early ideas fell flat. You can hear highlights of those conversations on this week’s EdSurge Podcast.

Even if it turns out that AI isn’t a fit to help build courses, Feldstein says the project is yielding lessons about where generative AI tools can help educators do their jobs better.

Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

Selecting Effective Edtech in the Age of AI

Kerry Friedman — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

The rise of AI promises new solutions to long-standing challenges. It also introduces some challenges of its own. In addition to concerns over privacy, bias and reliability, AI is driving a flood of new products in a broad range of sectors, including education. As options pile up, districts and schools struggle to identify effective solutions amid clever marketing and bold promises.

As a member of the LEARN Network, a federally funded initiative dedicated to supporting the development and scaling of quality educational products and programs, I've collaborated with researchers, developers, practitioners and educational leaders from across the country. Over the years, our team has gained unique insights into why some products succeed, why others fail, and what districts and schools may consider when selecting new tools and programs.

Effective edtech has never — and should never — be designed to replace human relationships with students.

One lesson we’ve learned is that the current wave of AI-powered edtech is not all that different from the products and programs we are used to. Some products show promise; others fall flat. Though options are more plentiful and technology advanced, schools must remain diligent in their selection processes. Based on our work and our conversations with leaders in this space, here are some important questions to ask while searching for an edtech solution in the age of AI.

What Does It Do?

Effective edtech has never — and should never — be designed to replace human relationships with students. In response to the rise of school-based AI programs, policymakers in states like California and Minnesota and organizations like the National Education Association are pushing to ensure that educators remain at the center of education. Quality edtech, whether powered by AI or not, should work to enhance educational effectiveness and efficiency.

One key differentiator decision-makers may consider is between student-facing AI, which students interact with directly, and products and programs designed for practitioners, administrators and other staff. Both uses require unique considerations. For example, for student-facing products, it is essential that developers use guardrails to prevent bias, protect privacy, and ensure reliability. For administrative applications, considerations will likely focus more on whether the edtech increases efficiency while leveraging the expertise of humans.

Does It Have a Solid Evidence Base?

The most critical factor in selecting edtech is its evidence base. Is there research to back its claims? If so, how reliable is that research? As we’ve found in our work, these can be difficult questions to answer.

Edtech only works if it can be implemented effectively. Products can fail if they are too cumbersome, don't fit into staff workflows or don't align with existing programs.

The Every Student Succeeds Act’s (ESSA) tiers of evidence can provide a useful framework for evaluating edtech, describing the varying degrees of research that can underlie a product. Simply meeting an ESSA tier of evidence, however, does not guarantee effectiveness. Products or programs that meet ESSA’s lowest tier, for example, may only be based on evidence-backed strategies or practices. The products themselves may never have been tested. Researchers Mary Bratsch-Hines and Heather Aiken, leaders behind the TRI-Reading App, expanded on the importance of comprehensive evaluation in a recent episode of The SRI Homeroom podcast.

“Sometimes people can claim that they are following the science of reading purely because they are covering the five elements from the National Reading Panel… But how they packaged it together, we don’t necessarily know that the program as a whole will work.” — Mary Bratsch-Hines, Senior Manager for Research and Evaluation at the University of Florida Lastinger Center for Learning.

Edtech that meets ESSA’s highest tiers of evidence, Tiers 1 and 2, have been more rigorously evaluated, with findings cited in repositories like the What Works Clearinghouse.

However, a lack of evidence does not necessarily mean a product is ineffective. Some edtech, particularly in the age of AI, may be too new to boast an extensive research base. In these instances, products should at least present a compelling case and meet a priority need.

Schools may also consider compiling their own body of evidence. Examine developer briefs, speak with peers in similar contexts and, if you decide to move forward, conduct a pilot to generate real, localized evidence. H. Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), recently wrote about the piloting process for the LEARN Network blog.

Does It Really Meet Your Needs?

While evidence is crucial, it’s not the only factor that can influence the success or failure of a new product or program. Schools and districts should also carefully consider their goals. Is there a specific challenge you are attempting to address or a set of outcomes you hope to improve? Take some time to investigate your needs, speak with team members and ensure you fully understand the scope of your challenges and their root causes.

Some products claim to offer broad, generalized benefits and improvements for schools, faculty and students. In our conversations with educational leaders, however, we've found that teachers are often unlikely to adopt solutions to problems if they don't perceive them as significant. Ensuring that the technology addresses a recognized need is critical for successful implementation.

Does It Fit Your School Context?

Edtech should be designed to meet the needs of all students, fostering growth and equity through education. When products or programs aren't relevant or accessible to members of the communities they serve, they can inadvertently cause harm.

Edtech only works if it can be implemented effectively. Products can fail if they are too cumbersome, don't fit into staff workflows or don't align with existing programs. Examine your current systems, staff capabilities and capacity to determine if a product is a proper fit.

For example, the developers of A2i, an impactful, broadly scaled tool designed to improve literacy outcomes for young students, partly attributed its success to its integration with various learning management systems. Implementation can suffer when a product requires a radical departure from established processes, duties or expectations.

Districts and schools may also consider the unique needs of their community. Are there any structural, cultural or environmental factors that might limit some members’ access to a new product or limit its effectiveness for the community as a whole? Ensuring that the product fits your specific environment is crucial for its success.

How Was the Product Developed?

Effective edtech often results from extensive discussions, collaborations, revisions and iterations involving a diverse range of stakeholders. At the LEARN Network, we encourage researchers and developers to involve school and district leaders, educators and community members in the design phase of their work. Products that lack sufficient input can struggle with unforeseen challenges upon implementation.

In our recent webinar focused on rural schools and communities, a panel of researchers, practitioners and educational leaders cautioned against “drive-through approaches” to product design, encouraging developers to employ a more inclusive, community-focused approach to development.

Does It Prioritize Equity?

Edtech should be designed to meet the needs of all students, fostering growth and equity through education. When products or programs aren't relevant or accessible to members of the communities they serve, they can inadvertently cause harm.

The rise of AI-powered edtech offers districts and schools a unique opportunity to seek out new tools and programs that are accessible, equitable, and responsive to the needs of diverse learners. In a recent LEARN Network blog, we spoke with leading voices from the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) Institute and SRI about this opportunity and some potential paths forward.

Free LEARN Network resources for researchers, developers and educators:

The LEARN to Scale Toolkit: a comprehensive resource for researchers and developers based on the Invent-Apply-Transition framework
Stories of Scaling: a profile series highlighting impactful researchers, entrepreneurs and evidence-based products
The LEARN Network Blog: articles, podcasts and Q&As featuring experts and thought leaders from across the U.S.
LEARN Network Research: action-oriented research briefs focused on product development, procurement and more

An effective method for centering equity in the edtech search process is by elevating student voice. Students are self-aware, highly technologically competent and carry unique experiences and perspectives on learning. By involving students in their piloting and procurement processes, districts and schools can help ensure they’re adopting technology that will serve all members of their community.

Decision makers can also prioritize student voice in their edtech search, considering products that have been designed and developed in collaboration with students. LEARN Network researcher Ela Joshi expanded on the value of student voice in this recent podcast.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to power effective new tools and approaches, reducing burdens on schools, fostering equity and inclusion, and helping students overcome long-standing barriers. As we’re seeing in other sectors, however, the letters “AI” are not always indicative of quality.

In their search for the next generation of edtech solutions, we must all avoid flash and continue focusing on fundamentals. By prioritizing evidence, understanding specific needs, ensuring contextual fit, examining how products are developed, emphasizing equity and including diverse voices in the search and selection processes, educational leaders can navigate the complexities of AI-powered edtech and find products that truly lead to better outcomes.

The information reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N220012 to SRI International. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Two States Are Responsible for Most of the Nation’s School Book Bans

Nadra Nittle, The 19th — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 01:23:00 -0700

This story was originally published by The 19th.

The number of books banned in public schools over the past year skyrocketed to more than 10,000, with two states — Iowa and Florida — responsible for most of them, according to preliminary findings released by PEN America on Monday.

The report comes during Banned Books Week, which first began in 1982 to raise awareness about the importance of free and openly accessible information.

The rise in banned books during the 2023-24 school year — nearly tripling from 3,362 bans PEN recorded the previous year — can be attributed partly to the singling out of books about romance and women’s sexual experiences and those about rape or sexual abuse, according to PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for the protection of free expression. Books with LGBTQ+ or racial themes or characters from marginalized groups also continue to be targeted.

PEN America’s report does not reflect the banning of unique titles, so if a dozen school districts all banned the same book, it would count as 12 bans, a PEN representative explained.

A number of books, many of which are works by women of color, showed up on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the first time over the past year. They include Julia Alvarez’s 1991 novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” about four immigrant sisters from the Dominican Republic — a popular pick for readers during Latinx Heritage Month. Other recent entries to the index include Amy Tan’s novel about the Chinese-American daughter of an immigrant mother, “The Kitchen God’s Wife” (1991); Terry McMillan’s romance novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996); and Ellen Oh’s novel inspired by her mother’s experiences during the Korean War, “Finding Junie Kim” (2021).

Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1937), Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943), Olive Ann Burns’ “Cold Sassy Tree”(1984), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” (2000) and Julie Murphy’s “Puddin’” (2018) also debuted on the index.

The 1953 novel “Go Tell It On the Mountain” by James Baldwin, a champion of civil and gay rights, appeared on the index for the first time, as did books related to slavery such as Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of An American Family” (1976) and W.E.B. DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” (1935). Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel “Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)” debuted on the index, too.

More than a dozen new state and local policies contributed to the escalation of book bans over the past year. They include Iowa’s SF 496, which took effect last year and has been interpreted to mean that books with sexual or gender themes should be barred. According to PEN America, the law prompted thousands of book bans during the 2023-’24 school year, compared with just 14 bans in the state during the previous school year.

Florida’s HB 1069, which also took effect last year, mandates that books challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed as they undergo review. PEN America said the statutory process the law created for book banning and “the state guidance building on it” has led to a spike in statewide book bans. In Florida and Iowa combined, roughly 8,000 book bans were recorded.

In Wisconsin, the Elkhorn Area School District banned more than 300 books for months on end, PEN America found. The books were removed after a single parent challenged them, but after the district reviewed the titles, they were eventually returned to the shelves, albeit with restrictions such as parental permission to check out certain titles. The organization expects newly enacted laws such as Utah’s HB 29, South Carolina’s Regulation 43-170 and Tennessee’s HB 843 to cause more book bans this school year.

The Utah law requires all schools in the state to ban a book once three school districts have found it objectionable. South Carolina’s regulation bans books with sexual subject matter and gives the state Board of Education the ability to censor works statewide. The Tennessee law requires schools to remove books with gratuitous violence or sexual content.

To mark Banned Books Week, the American Library Association (ALA) has also released preliminary data related to censorship, focusing on book bans in public, school and academic libraries between January 1 and August 31. ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom said it identified 414 attempts to censor works and that there were documented challenges to 1,128 unique book titles.

The number of attempts to censor books actually fell this year compared with last year’s 695 cases, the ALA found. The organization attributes this to widespread efforts to stop censorship. Librarians, students and concerned community members have organized against book banning in recent years, and book banning disputes have gone to court. This includes a federal court’s preliminary injunction on Arkansas’ Act 372, which would open librarians and bookstore owners in the state to criminal prosecution if they failed to remove “unsuitable” works from their shelves.

Censorship is an issue that has drawn attention from the 2024 presidential candidates. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign platform accuses President Joe Biden’s administration of “using the public school system to push their perverse sexual, racial and political material on our youth.” In July, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, criticized book bans while speaking to the American Federation of Teachers union in Texas.

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history,” she said. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books. Can you imagine?”

The theme of this year’s Banned Books Week is “Freed Between the Lines” to draw attention to how liberating reading can be. The week ends Saturday with Let Freedom Read Day to urge communities to fight censorship. Film director Ava DuVernay is the 2024 honorary chair of the day, while activist Julia Garnett, who fought book bans in Tennessee, is the youth honorary chair.

Should AI Bots Do Scholarly Research?

Jeffrey R. Young — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 02:14:00 -0700

Cong Lu has long been fascinated by how to use technology to make his job as a research scientist more efficient. But his latest project takes the idea to an extreme.

Lu, who is a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia, is part of a team building an “AI Scientist” with the ambitious goal of creating an AI-powered system that can autonomously do every step of the scientific method.

“The AI Scientist automates the entire research lifecycle, from generating novel research ideas, writing any necessary code, and executing experiments, to summarizing experimental results, visualizing them, and presenting its findings in a full scientific manuscript,” says a write-up on the project’s website. The AI system even attempts a “peer review,” of the research paper, which essentially brings in another chatbot to check the work of the first.

An initial version of this AI Scientist has already been released — anyone can download the code for free. And plenty of people have. It did the coding equivalent of going viral, with more than 7,500 people liking the project on the code library GitHub.

To Lu, the goal is to accelerate scientific discovery by letting every scientist effectively add Ph.D.-level assistants to quickly push boundaries, and to “democratize” science by making it easier to conduct research.

“If we scale up this system, it could be one of the ways that we truly scale scientific discovery to thousands of underfunded areas,” he says. “A lot of times the bottleneck is on good personnel and years of training. What if we could deploy hundreds of scientists on your pet problems and have a go at it?”

But he admits there are plenty of challenges to the approach — such as preventing the AI systems from “hallucinating,” as generative AI in general is prone to do.

And if it works, the project raises a host of existential questions about what role human researchers — the workforce that powers much of higher education — would play in the future.

The project comes at a moment where other scientists are raising concerns about the role of AI in research.

A paper out this month, for instance, found that AI chatbots are already being used to create fabricated research papers that are showing up in Google Scholar, often on contentious topics like climate research.

And as tech firms continue to release more-powerful chatbots to the public — like the new version of ChatGPT put out by OpenAI this month — prominent AI experts are raising fresh concerns that AI systems could leap guardrails in ways that threaten global safety. After all, part of “democratizing research” could lead to greater risk of weaponizing science.

It turns out the bigger question may be whether the latest AI technology is even capable of making novel scientific breakthroughs by automating the scientific process, or there’s something uniquely human about the endeavor.

Checking for Errors

The field of machine learning — the only field the AI Scientist tool is designed for so far — may be uniquely suited for automation.

For one thing, it is highly structured. And even when humans do the research, all of the work happens on a computer.

“For anything that requires a wet lab or hands-on stuff, we’ve still got to wait for our robotic assistants to show up,” Lu says.

But the researcher says that pharmaceutical companies have already done significant work to automate the process of drug discovery, and he believes AI could take those measures further.

One practical challenge for the AI Scientist project has been avoiding AI hallucinations. For instance, Lu says that because large language models continually generate the next character or “token” based on probability derived from training data, there are times when such systems might produce errors when copying data. For instance, the AI Scientist might enter 7.1 when the correct number in a dataset was 9.2, he says.

To prevent that, his team is using a non-AI system when moving some data, and having the system “rigorously check through all of the numbers,” to detect any errors and correct them. He says a second version of the team’s system that they expect to release later this year will be more accurate than the current one when it comes to handling data.

Even in the current version, the project’s website boasts that the AI Scientist can carry out research far cheaper than human Ph.D.s can, estimating that a research paper can be created — from idea generation to writing and peer review — for about $15 in computing costs.

Does Lu worry that the system will put researchers like himself out of work?

“With the current capabilities of AI systems, I don't think so,” says Lu. “I think right now it's mainly an extremely powerful research assistant that can help you take the first steps and early explorations on all the ideas that you never had time for, or even help you brainstorm and investigate a few ideas on a new topic for you.”

Down the road, if the tool improves, though, Lu admits it could eventually raise tougher questions for the role of human researchers. Though in that context research will not be the only thing transformed by advanced AI tools. For now, though, he sees it as what he calls a “force multiplier.”

“It’s just like how code assistants now let anyone very simply code up a mobile game app or a new website,” he says.

The project’s leaders have put in guardrails on the kinds of projects it can attempt, to prevent the system from becoming an AI mad scientist.

“We don’t really want loads of new viruses or lots of different ways to make bombs,” he says.

And they’ve limited the AI Scientist to a maximum of running two or three hours at a time, he says, “so we have control of it,” noting that there’s only so much “havoc it could wreak in that time.”

Multiplying Bad Science?

As the use of AI tools spreads rapidly, some scientists worry that they could be used to actually hinder scientific progress by flooding the web with fabricated papers.

When researcher Jutta Haider, a professor of librarianship, information, education and IT at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, went looking on Google Scholar for papers with AI-fabricated results, she was surprised at how many she found.

“Because it was really badly produced ones,” she explains, noting that the papers were clearly not written by a human. “Just simple proofreading should have eliminated those.”

She says she expects there are many more AI-fabricated papers that her team did not detect. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” she says, since AI is getting more sophisticated, so it will be increasingly difficult to tell if something was human- or AI-written.

One problem, she says, is that it is easy to get a paper listed in Google Scholar, and if you are not a researcher yourself, it may be difficult to tell reputable journals and articles from those created by bad actors trying to spread misinformation or add fabricated work to their CV and hope no one checks where it is published.

“Because of the publish-or-perish paradigm that rules academia, you can't make a career without publishing a lot,” Haider says. “But some of the papers are really bad, so nobody will probably make a career with those ones that we found.”

She and her colleagues are calling on Google to do more to scan for AI-fabricated articles and other junk science. “What I really recommend Google Scholar do is hire a team of librarians to figure out how to change it,” she adds. “It isn’t transparent. We don’t know how it populates the index.”

EdSurge reached out to Google officials but got no response.

Lu, of the AI Scientist project, says that junk science papers have been a problem for a while, and he shares the concern that AI could make the phenomenon more pervasive. “We recommend whenever you run the AI Scientist system, that anything that is AI-generated should be watermarked so it is verifiably AI-generated and it cannot be passed off as a real submission,” he says.

And he hopes that AI can actually be used to help scan existing research — whether written by humans or bots — to ferret out problematic work.

But Is It Science?

While Lu says the AI Scientist has already produced some useful results, it remains unclear whether the approach can lead to novel scientific breakthroughs.

“AI bots are really good thieves in many ways,” he says. “They can copy anyone’s art style. But could they invent a new art style that hasn’t been seen before? It’s hard to say.”

He says there is a debate in the scientific community about whether major discoveries come from a pastiche of ideas over time or involve unique acts of human creativity and genius.

“For instance, were Einstein’s ideas new, or were those ideas in the air at the time?” he wonders. “Often the right idea has been staring us in the face the whole time.”

The consequences of the AI Scientist will hinge on that philosophical question.

For Haider, the Swedish scholar, she’s not worried about AI ever usurping her job.

“There’s no point for AI to be doing science,” she says. “Science comes from a human need to understand — an existential need to want to understand – the world.”

“Maybe there will be something that mimics science,” she concludes, “but it’s not science.”

Which Language 'Superpowers' Do Bilingual Students Bring to U.S. Schools?

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:07:43 -0700

Los datos ya llegaron, y revelan algo interesante sobre los estudiantes bilingües de los Estados Unidos.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

No need to hop over to Google Translate. Chances are good that if you were one of the 5.3 million English learners in public schools, you’d know the opening line explains that recent data has something interesting to reveal about the U.S.’s bilingual students.

The Department of Education dubbed speaking a second language a “superpower” when it announced plans last year to support multilingual education with grants. In states like California and New York, students speak as many as 150 languages.

Spanish is by far the most common home language among English learners, accounting for roughly 75 percent of them, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recent numbers from fall 2021. Its hold on the top spot has held steady as long as the data has been tracked, even as the number of English learners has grown in new regions.

Arabic, the second-most common home language, comes in with a mere 2.5 percent share of English learners nationwide. It’s followed — oddly enough — by English at 2.2 percent. That group is made up of students who may live in multilingual households, or who were adopted from countries where they grew up speaking another language but now live in an English-speaking household, according to NCES.

Chinese and Vietnamese round out the top five home languages, each spoken by less than 2 percent of English learners.

But small percentages don’t necessarily mean few students, relatively speaking, and the diversity of languages changes from region to region.

Vietnamese is the second-most spoken language by English learners in both Texas and Kansas. That comes to about 17,300 students who speak Vietnamese at home in Texas, but only about 800 in Kansas.

Mandarin comes in second among English learners in California at around 2 percent of home languages, but that represents more than 22,000 students.

‘Sink or Swim’ for Some

The English language instruction students encounter can run the gamut from submersion — where they “sink or swim” in all-English classes — to programs where literacy and subject matter is taught equally in English and a home language. While not all emergent bilinguals — as they’re also called — are immigrants, some districts may offer programs or schools for students who are new to the country.

It’s not uncommon for newcomer students to find themselves in the “sink or swim” scenario if they’re in a school district where not many of their peers are also learning English, says Erica Saldívar García, program director of TESOL/Bilingual/World Language Education at New York University.

English as a Second Language (ESL) programs aim to help students learn English quickly so they can participate in all-English coursework. They might include ESL teachers pulling students out of subject matter classes for language instruction, or have ESL teachers going into general education classes with their students.

“It works for a lot of schools because, when your resources are limited and you don't have enough to staff a full department of English teachers who can support multilingual learners,” Saldívar García explains, “then one person sort of gets tasked with a bigger caseload, and they have students across age levels and grades. Ideally they would work in collaboration with the classroom teacher to support them on continent areas like math, science, etc.”

ESL is different from bilingual education, where students are taught subject material in both English and their home language. These programs might have a goal to transition students to schooling fully in English, and others aim to reach 50-50 instruction in both languages.

Bilingual education teachers are expected to teach in the home language, which means that staffing those programs can be challenging.

Some schools have gotten creative to ensure they have enough teachers, says April Salerno, associate professor of education at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development.

“They will partner teachers together so that one is teaching in English and one is teaching in the other language,” she says. “For instance, students might go with the English-speaking teacher for half the day and the bilingual teacher for the other half, so they have two classes covered that way.”

That’s not the case for ESL instruction, where the teacher speaks only English with students. It’s often impossible for teachers to speak every home language of their students, Salerno adds, particularly in diverse areas.

“I think that's more and more the case for teachers, that they have classrooms that have the wonderful resource of having many, many languages represented,” Salerno says, “which often, unfortunately, we talk about as a challenge. I think it's a beautiful opportunity, but it also means that no one teacher is going to speak all of those languages.”

California has the most English learners in the country, and about 130 languages are spoken by its students. Hover over each square to see the percentage each home language makes up.

Source: California Department of Education. Chart by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

Removing Spanish makes it easier to see how common the other home languages are in relation to each other.

Source: California Department of Education. Chart by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

Question of Power

Dual language programs are a two-way exchange, wherein English learners and English-speaking students help each other pick up the new language while receiving instruction in both.

While the model is considered a “gold standard” by some in the bilingual education world, Saldívar García is among those who have a different view. There are inherently power dynamics at play, she says, because families of native English speakers are typically more well-off than those of English learners.

Dual language programs may appease families of English-speaking students who feel their children would be getting less resources if school offered bilingual education only to English learners, she explains, but there’s also the possibility that more affluent parents could use their cachet to influence the program’s direction.

“When bilingual education started, it was very much a political act to serve immigrant students who had a linguistic need,” Saldívar García says. “There's a lot of research that literally calls this the gentrification of bilingual education, because now bilingual education has become this new, sexy, different program that's available to kids in schools.”

She adds the caveat that most students, regardless of their language background, will have a good experience in dual language programs.

“They'll learn from each other, they'll become friends, and there's a lot of cultural exchange that is mostly positive,” Saldívar García says, “but the part I struggle with is with the politics of it. If we're not careful with creating opportunities for — whether it be newcomer families or families that are already in the U.S. — you enter dangerous terrain where we don't want these programs to be serving only the needs of one half of those students, and not the other half.”

Helping Students Acclimate

Some districts may have programs or schools designed specifically for students who have recently arrived in the U.S., Salerno says.

“Sometimes newcomer programs might be a school within a school, or they might even be just a single class within a school that specifically draws those students who've just recently arrived,” she says, with placement depending on a student’s language proficiency in English.

Salerno points out that although she doesn’t necessarily like the word “newcomer” — which can “label [or] position students as not really belonging or not fully being located there in the school setting yet,” she says — it’s the most widely used.

There’s bound to be a lot of variation among states and programs, but Salerno says she would expect to see families of those students getting targeted outreach to help them understand and navigate the school system.

“Parents might come with all kinds of different expectations about schooling, might not know what the grading system is in the U.S.,” she explains. “So all of these things that go along with acclimating to U.S. schools often fall in the responsibility of newcomer programs.”

Supporting Young Students’ Social-Emotional Needs in the Post-COVID Era

Katie Pothireddy — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

The COVID-19 pandemic has left a lasting impact on students’ social-emotional well-being. As schools return to in-person learning, educators face the challenge of addressing the diverse emotional needs of students who have experienced unprecedented disruptions. Research shows that the pandemic has heightened feelings of anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty among young learners, making social-emotional learning (SEL) more critical than ever.

A study conducted by the American Psychological Association found that post-COVID mental-health-related incidents in children and adolescents were on the rise. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted a significant increase in mental health-related emergency department visits among children. As we navigate this new landscape, schools must adopt innovative and practical strategies to support students’ SEL needs, even with limited time and resources.

Kezie helps students identify their feelings.
Image credit: Khan Academy Kids

Unique Strategies for Implementing SEL With Limited Resources

Emotional Check-In Stations

Create simple, designated spaces in classrooms where students can "check in" with their emotions at the beginning and end of the day. These stations can include mood meters, emoji charts, or even a "feelings box" where students can drop in anonymous notes. This practice not only helps students identify and express their emotions but also provides teachers with insight into their emotional states.

Allowing students to express themselves creatively can be a powerful outlet for processing complex emotions.

Storytelling and Role-Playing

Encourage students to share their stories and experiences from the pandemic or other challenging moments through creative storytelling or role-playing activities. This approach allows students to process their emotions and build empathy by understanding the experiences of their peers.

Mindful Moments

Integrate short, mindful moments throughout the school day to help students manage stress and focus. These can include breathing exercises, guided imagery or simple stretches. Mindfulness practices are quick to implement and can be done as a class or individually, providing a calm and centered start to the day.

Virtual Pen Pals and Buddy Systems

Foster connections and reduce feelings of isolation by setting up virtual pen pals or buddy systems within the school or with other schools (feel free to use dictation or voice recording for students still gaining writing confidence!). This initiative allows students to share their thoughts and feelings with peers, providing a sense of community and support. It also enhances communication skills and empathy.

Creative Expression Through Art and Play

Provide opportunities for creative expression through art, music and play. Allowing students to express themselves creatively can be a powerful outlet for processing complex emotions. Activities like drawing, crafting or playing musical instruments can be integrated into the school day without requiring extensive resources.

Owen practices identifying emotions.
Image credit: Allison Leedie / Khan Academy Kids

How Edtech Can Help

Educational technology has become an invaluable resource in addressing the diverse SEL needs of students, especially in the post-COVID era. With many schools facing resource constraints, edtech provides scalable and flexible solutions that can be easily integrated into daily routines. Here’s how edtech can support SEL initiatives:

Scalable Access to SEL Resources

Edtech platforms like Khan Academy Kids offer a vast array of SEL content that students, teachers and parents can access from anywhere. This accessibility ensures that SEL resources are available to all students, allowing them to utilize them when they need support the most.

Reya helps users explore their feelings through storytelling.
Image credit: Khan Academy Kids

Personalized Learning Experiences

One of the significant advantages of edtech is its ability to personalize learning experiences. Platforms can adapt content to meet each student's specific emotional and developmental needs. For example, the interactive activities in Khan Academy Kids’ SEL curriculum can be tailored to help students explore their emotions at their own pace, making the learning experience more relevant and impactful.

Integration of Interactive Tools

Edtech enables interactive tools, such as digital mood meters, emotion charts and story-based scenarios, which can be more engaging for students than traditional methods. These tools can help students better understand and express their emotions. For instance, Khan Academy Kids’ use of expressive characters and voice recordings allows students to explore a range of emotions in a fun and engaging way.

Recommended Resources:

Support for Teachers and Parents

Edtech platforms provide valuable support for teachers and parents by offering ready-to-use resources and activities. This support is crucial, especially in environments where educators may lack specific training in SEL. Khan Academy Kids offers comprehensive guides and activities that can be used in both classroom and home settings, ensuring consistent SEL support across different environments.

Data-Driven Insights

Many edtech platforms offer data analytics tools that help educators track students’ progress and identify areas where additional support may be needed. This data-driven approach allows for more targeted interventions, ensuring that students receive the help they need when they need it.

Mila and Juliet identify feelings.
Image credit: Denisse Chao / Khan Academy Kids

Building a Resilient Future Together

As we navigate the complexities of the post-COVID educational landscape, prioritizing social-emotional learning is more important than ever. By leveraging sustainable practices and scaling them using edtech, schools can provide scalable, personalized and engaging SEL experiences that support students’ emotional and mental well-being.

As Student Smartphone Use Increases, So Does Our Need for Consistent School Policies

Sarah Pallito — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 01:00:00 -0700

Each fall, every teacher must wage a few key wars with a new class of students. In my classroom, one battle is around bathroom usage. Another is assigned seats. A third is side conversations—especially during our first few weeks of class community building. Increasingly, though, the biggest fight that never seems to end is around phone usage.
This year, the Pew Research Center reported that 9 in 10 American adults own a smartphone. While most of us can recall what life was like before our national smartphone addiction, most of today’s adolescents are too young to remember such a time; however, smartphone ownership among 13 to 17-year-olds almost mirrors adults. Furthermore, smartphone use among teenagers has been a growing obstacle to learning.

My colleague and I teach the same group of 11th grade students in our Title I high school in Oakland; she teaches history, and I teach them science. Given the size of this group, we are able to build strong relationships with these 60 students during our 40 weeks together.
Early in the year, we noticed most students were extremely attached to their phones. So, about halfway through last year, we decided to investigate how much screen time our students consumed. While not unexpected, the results of our investigation baffled us. Kids were reading off figures like “8 hours and 43 minutes daily” with no shame. The highest across the group? Just under 12 hours per day. The lowest? An admirable 2 hours and 50 minutes. Weekly? The vast majority totaled over 40 hours — more than an entire workweek spent staring at a screen.

As teachers, this is not only exhausting but demoralizing. While 77% of public schools have some type of cellphone regulation during classroom time, our high school does not. This is an extremely controversial issue at my school site and in other schools across the country. As school safety concerns rise with campus shootings, parents are also worried about not being able to contact their children. However, while this is a valid concern for many parents, teachers are also battling signs of poor mental health, decreased engagement and overall general lack of socialization with peers in our students.

As a teacher standing in front of an audience who simply cannot put their phones down, the diminishing attention span of my students takes a toll. When I talk to other staff at my school, the majority of people want a phone usage policy across the school. Many academic cohorts in my school have their own policies with varying degrees of success, but some teachers are adamant about policy implementation. Teachers who don’t want policies often cite lack of support as a major reason; this could be due to unresponsive or unsupportive administration, lack of clear consequences on a school-wide basis or lack of consistency across classrooms.

Each of these factors leads to teachers having to fight the same battles every day. Not only does it take away from our overall teaching time, but it impacts our relationships with students—the only thing keeping many of us in the classroom in one of the lowest-paying but most difficult-to-teach districts in the Bay Area.

Even if you uphold clear structures in your classroom, they must be retaught each day because your students enter seven different spaces throughout the day with varying policies and expectations before you see them again. Without a school-wide policy, it’s not only confusing for students but there’s no real buy-in without a chain of consequences that reaches outside one specific classroom.

Shifted Landscape

In my experience as a teacher, the classroom landscape was distinctly different before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the notorious Zoom Year, phones were a minor issue; students were generally receptive to being redirected and there was an overall culture of understanding of how to act in a classroom. Often, when students were finished with their work or needed a break, they’d chat with me about their weekends, telling me about events in their lives such as a morning spent fishing with their dad or their little sister’s upcoming quinceañera. Sometimes, they’d pull out a book or talk to their classmates. These moments were priceless to me as their teacher, and these small check-ins made going to work a joy.

Now, the entire landscape has shifted. I’ve noticed that students generally lack the mental fortitude and self-regulation to put their phones down. Each day, I battle against social media, online gambling, sports games, texting friends and everything else that the internet provides, and for the most part, it’s me versus my group of 28 students. Most of them seem to understand that it’s an expectation I have in my classroom, but the same general understanding of smartphone etiquette is no longer ingrained in the school culture or this generation of students.

Instead, kids see phone usage as a non-issue; it’s simply something that everyone does. This creates a barrier between my students and me and highlights so many factors that are pushing teachers out of the field, such as increased workload and mental health. Additionally, because of the controversy around smartphones, we feel unappreciated and invalidated in our efforts to encourage kids to engage in our classrooms and create a positive learning community.

Managing Expectations

Because of the combined inconsistency in school policy and significant overuse of smartphones among my students, navigating this issue has made my teaching experience incredibly difficult — especially since I often go hours on campus without interacting with another adult. When an issue plagues the way you teach and has become an accepted norm among students, it can be hard to continue pouring energy into the effort when you feel alone in a losing battle.

Though there is clear progress in policy around smartphone regulation in states like California, there is not yet clarity on how these policies will look in schools with varying access to resources. Current political movements, like All4Ed, raise questions about funding provided to Title I schools to uphold such policies.

As I settle into this school year, I’m hopeful that my school will make some progress in developing a sound, consistent policy that applies to every classroom. However, as our budget has been cut significantly, further reducing resources and staff available to address phone use in classrooms and around the school, I’ve adjusted my expectations in hopes of future movement on this issue.

Yet again, teachers are tasked with solving society’s issues without resources or support. Smartphone use is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner than later in schools so that this generation of kids can build and focus on the skills they need to succeed in the world.

Cash-Starved Districts Are Turning to Four-Day School Weeks. Will That Harm Students?

Daniel Mollenkamp — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:42:27 -0700

The need was becoming dire.

A school district in Brighton, in the Denver metro area of Colorado, was having a hard time keeping teachers. The salaries in the district, 27J Schools, were low for the region. And in Colorado, voters have to approve higher property taxes to send additional dollars to schools, including for salary bumps, but by 2018 voters had refused six straight times.

So, strapped for cash, the district decided to switch to a four-day school week.

Chris Fiedler, then the superintendent of 27J Schools, had previously worked in a rural district on a shortened schedule, and he hoped it would help attract teachers in the absence of better pay. Frustrated and eager for solutions, everyone seemed ready to try a new approach, Fiedler says.

“You just get tired of being kind of the minor league team in the Denver metro area, in terms of teacher and adult talent, working with kids — and not just teachers, but administrators as well. So how do you find a way to encourage them to stay and encourage them to join you in the first place?” he says.

In his eyes, the experiment was a success. The district now punches above its weight in teacher retention and the policy has proven consistently popular with students and teachers in the years since it was introduced, he argues.

Fiedler isn’t solitary in his enthusiasm for this model of schooling, and the four-day school week has, in some ways, taken off. When many schools are suffering staffing shortages and tight budgets, districts like 27J Schools have turned to shorter school weeks to attract and retain teachers. As many as 900 districts have embraced these abridged weeks, according to a 2023 estimate from the Associated Press. (There are about 13,000 districts in the country.) Colorado, where 27J is located, has proven a particularly fertile ground for four-day school weeks, and more districts in the state have moved to a four-day school week than any other state except Missouri, according to one estimate.

But though educators like Fiedler trumpet these shortened weeks, others worry that they do little to attract teachers — and may even harm students and voters.

‘Slightly Negative’

Interest in four-day weeks usually stems from the need to recruit or retain teachers in the absence of funding. Supporters also value it for giving students and teachers time that enables a better school-life balance. But the evidence paints an ambiguous to slightly negative picture, according to researchers like Van Schoales, senior policy director for the nonprofit Keystone Policy Center, which published a recent report on the four-day school week in Colorado. In fact, the data from the state doesn’t give supporters or detractors a clear victory, according to the report.

Schoales says he became interested in four-day weeks after noting that his colleagues from within Colorado were talking about it more post-pandemic. While there was some national research, there wasn’t much within the state yet, he says.

Some national studies link four-day school weeks to slumping academic performance for students. For instance, one analysis from the Annenberg Institute found that the available data shows a “relatively small, negative average” in standardized test scores for reading and math in districts that adopt four-day policies. The Annenberg analysis also noted that the negative effects of four-day weeks are disproportionately larger in non-rural schools and may compound over time.

Still, the Colorado Department of Education was “rubber-stamping” all of the proposals from districts looking to change over to a four-day school week, even though some superintendents and school board members were “quietly raising concerns,” Schoales says.

What did the Keystone researchers learn? Universally, superintendents report that they are motivated to try this because they don't have enough money to pay teachers, Schoales says. But even if some districts were bullish on the policy, the Keystone study found that truncated school weeks were not effective for keeping teachers. It may have worked for some districts, Schoales says, but overall the districts that adopted these policies had higher turnover rates.

Previous studies show the effect of this policy ranges from neutral to negative on students, with most national studies showing it has a small but negative impact on learning, he says. If true, the differences could stack up over time academically, and many of the districts adopting these policies, at least within Colorado, are far from reaching state standards already, he adds.

So, he asks, why not figure out how to solve the pay issue rather than cut days of instruction?

What Are Students Doing?

Plus, there’s another possible problem. How are students spending that fifth day, if not in school?

By one estimate, more than 60 percent of districts in Colorado have a four-day schedule, though these tend to be small and rural districts, meaning they only account for around 14 percent of the state’s students. But four-day school weeks are spreading to larger and more urban areas. It’s not clear how well-attended after-school programs are in these regions, Schoales says, adding that it was difficult to perform a thorough analysis on attendance because these programs are being run outside of the district. But, he says, at least one person they interviewed for the report suggested they were having a hard time engaging lower-income families on the fifth day.

When asked, Schoales identified Brighton, which has more than 22,000 students and is comparatively large and urban, as the place with some of the most robust outside-of-school programming.

So what does it look like there?

Since adopting the four-day week, there are no classes on Mondays in the district, and the remaining days were lengthened to avoid lost instruction time. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t students at school even on Mondays, Fiedler, the former superintendent of 27J Schools, says: Extracurriculars such as athletics, students council meetings and choir practices still happen on Mondays. City and community programs including the Boys & Girls Club also pitched in when the district made the switch, beefing up staff to make programs more available on those days, he adds. An orchestra program started up as well.

But after the first year, the city stepped back from its expanded programs, in part because they were not being used, Fiedler says.

The district also expanded a preexisting program — where parents pay a fee for day care — to cover Mondays, he says. Initially, around 1,000 parents expressed interest in the program. But when it actually started, there were more like 300 to 400 students enrolled, he says. Fiedler suspects that many families who had expressed interest in the program didn’t end up using it because they figured out ways to “share caregiver duties” — relying on neighborhood members, or older siblings or family members to step in and watch younger students on Mondays.

Because of the lower-than-expected interest, the district had to pivot from its plan to run these care programs in all elementary schools, instead running them in regional "centers" around the city.

‘The Second-Best Option’

When compared to other methods of attracting teachers, policy analysts recommend districts weigh their options for shortened school weeks carefully.

Some have suggested the practice may even be counterproductive for taxpayers reluctant to increase school budgets. For instance, voters in Brighton had shot down additional funding for schools repeatedly. But by denying the school district enough funding to adequately compensate teachers, voters ended up lowering their own property values, says Frank James Perrone, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Education. That’s because the district felt backed into a corner, as if it really didn't have a choice but to embrace four-day school weeks, he says. An analysis, coauthored by Perrone, found that the four-day school week policy actually lowered property values there by 2 to 4 percent, purportedly showing that homebuyers preferred to avoid the area.

But 27J Schools, the Brighton school district, is one of the largest districts in Colorado to adopt a four-day week. And Fiedler, the superintendent of the district who retired this year, isn’t swayed by the arguments against the four-day school week.

The district lost staff the first year it moved over to the four-day schedule. But in the years since, Fiedler says, it hasn’t had the turnover rate one would expect for one of the lowest-paying districts in the area. Data that Fiedler sent to EdSurge suggests that 27J had a 13.61 percent turnover rate in 2023 to 2024 with a $52,002 base teacher salary. That puts it in the lower third for teacher turnover in the area, despite offering the sixth-lowest base salary.

Plus, Fiedler adds, the graduation rates have lifted, including for disadvantaged students. Data from Fiedler shows a steady incline in graduation rates for the district between 2017 and 2022. That increase may not be because of the shortened weeks specifically, but he says that it happened at the same time, meaning that the policy didn’t prevent the district from improving academically.

Twice per month, the district also uses those free Mondays for teacher training, which has been good for morale, he adds.

But even if he isn’t convinced shortened weeks are a bad policy, Fiedler seems to agree that it’s not the ideal situation.

And he rejects the notion that four-day weeks save substantial money. It saved the district around $800,000 or so during the first year, Fiedler estimates, mostly in transportation costs but also in salaries for food service and electricity. In his view, that's such a small amount when compared to the overall budget that it's "not worth the heartache."

The “mill levy” override — that would provide additional money to boost teacher salaries — finally passed for 27J Schools in 2022. They still offer salaries at the lower end of the range, and the district likely won’t transition back. “Nobody called my office and said, ‘Now that you have money, you have to go back to a five-day school week,’” Fiedler says.

Even so, he says it feels “like the second-best option.” If the district had been able to find enough money to pay teachers what they are worth, it would have never tried the four-day school week, he says: “But absent that, you've got to try something new and different to be competitive.”

Now, when other districts ask about four-day school weeks, he tells them that he doesn’t want them to change over, because he doesn’t want the district to lose its “competitive edge.”

To Address the ‘Homework Gap,’ Is It Time to Revamp Federal Connectivity Programs?

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 10:43:00 -0700

One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many families didn’t have reliable internet access at home. As schools closed and classes moved online, educators rushed to improvise solutions for families without robust connections, setting up mobile Wi-Fi access points in school buses, sending home portable hot spots to those who needed it and more.

And even before the pandemic, educators were working to close the “homework gap,” the divide between students who can easily log on at home to access critical school materials and those who lack reliable home internet.

Now that schools are back open and pandemic relief funds are expiring, there’s a risk this gap will quickly widen unless policymakers take a fresh look at the nation’s connectivity. And it’s one that disproportionately affects students of color and those in underserved communities.

That’s the argument made by Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, in her new book, “Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass.”

“The truth is that most of these programs created during the pandemic relied on philanthropic and private sector support and continue to do so,” she writes of efforts to make sure students have online access for schoolwork. She calls for new federal legislation to “make these programs less vulnerable to political changes.”

The largest federal program offering support for school districts and libraries for internet connections, the E-rate, was created nearly 30 years ago. Back then much of today’s crucial technology for living and learning had not yet been invented — including smartphones, social media and AI chatbots. “It's been too long that we've kept these same policies in place,” Turner Lee told EdSurge. “We need ways we can guarantee support to schools for the type of infrastructure they need.”

EdSurge connected with Turner Lee for this week’s EdSurge Podcast. The sociologist shared her experiences traveling around the country — to stops including Marion, Alabama, West Phoenix, Arizona, and Hartford, Connecticut — asking people to share how they get connected and the challenges to digital access they face.

Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

Get Started, Then Get Better: Prioritizing Action in a PLC

Chad Dumas — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

“Don’t do that.”

Those were the words out of Dr. Richard DuFour’s mouth more than a decade ago as I was excitedly and passionately explaining how my district was going about our work.

DuFour and Dr. Robert Eaker are the two co-founders of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) at Work movement. Needless to say, I was taken aback, disappointed and a bit hurt.

And yet, he was right.

Approaching Professional Learning Communities — In Theory

What I shared with DuFour was our plan to implement the four critical questions of a PLC, as detailed by Solution Tree, systematically throughout the district.

Year One: What do we want students to know and be able to do?

We weren’t getting to action fast enough. We were taking too much time planning — too much time in the realm of theory instead of practice and too much time not directly impacting student learning through implementing all four critical questions of a professional learning community.

We had forms and processes to ensure that, over the course of the year, every teacher identified eight to 10 essentials per course, per semester. This meant teams would also have to come to a common understanding of what those essentials meant, when they would be taught and what resources they would be using to teach them.

Year Two: How will we know when they know or can do it?

We dubbed our summer training “PLC Q2 Boot Camp,” and the focus for the year was to develop high-quality end-of-unit or formative common assessments. Length didn’t matter, nor did assessment type. Student results on any of those assessments didn’t matter either. The emphasis was on simply creating assessments where the targets and evidence matched each other.

Then, after two years of work, we finally arrived at Critical Questions 3 and 4: “What will we do when students don’t know or can’t do it?” and “What will we do when students do know it or can do it?” Two full years later, with hours and hours of training and team meetings, the district began helping teams adjust their instructional practices.

DuFour quickly identified the problem with our plan: We weren’t getting to action fast enough. We were taking too much time planning — too much time in the realm of theory instead of practice and too much time not directly impacting student learning through implementing all four critical questions of a professional learning community.

While ultimately, the work we did led to significant improvements in student learning — five of seven school buildings were identified as Model PLC at Work schools — the results could have come faster, positively influencing even more students. The process would likely have gained momentum more quickly than what we experienced.

Moving Quickly to Action in a Professional Learning Community

What was DuFour’s alternative? Recurring cycles of inquiry and action research.

This means that educators should work on all four critical questions within the span of a single unit and that this cycle should repeat itself four or five times during the course of a single year.

As a fun example, in one district I was working with recently, the team was hesitant to jump into the work. You may be familiar with some of the common refrains: “Everything we teach is essential for students to know” and “We are dumbing down the curriculum if we eliminate content for students” were just a couple.

Despite their hesitation, they agreed to clarify what students truly needed to learn in their next unit, what was important for students to learn in that same unit, and what was nice to know in that upcoming unit.

To be clear, we focused only on the next unit and not an entire year’s study. The standard they were focused on had to do with students evaluating the impact of the people, places, events and symbols of the Greeks, Romans, Turks, Russians, etc. As you can imagine, there was no shortage of content embedded in that one standard, and as we all subconsciously know and unfortunately don’t frequently acknowledge out loud, there was — and often is in any single unit — far too much content for students to master everything. So we started with one civilization and tried to narrow down the specific people, places, events, and symbols that students needed to learn, those that were important to teach, and those that were nice to know.

What's taught versus what's learned: The most important differences

The result was a chart like below. It was, of course, filled in with the content the teachers would teach. The difference between this practice and past practices, however, was that the need row was what the team was committing to ensuring that students learn. Everything else was not considered essential and, therefore, would be taught but not guaranteed. In other words, a chart like this distinguishes the difference between what was going to be taught and what was going to be learned.

Turning a Professional Learning Community Around to Try Again

Need help turning your professional learning community efforts around? Check out these resources to learn more about repairing or improving your PLC:

Just six weeks later, I returned to work with the team. The results of that one activity from September? A reduction in the failure rate on their end-of-unit exam from a typical 15 to 20 students to just two. Quite frankly, all they did was clarify the targets students needed to learn. From there, they created some graphic organizers to help kids with that content.

The team stated that not only did fewer kids fail, but the understanding of the need-to-know targets was much greater than before. As a bonus, students were actually interested in the important and nice content and made more connections to the need-to-know content than in previous years. It was a total transformation in only a handful of weeks, not years.

Lesson Learned: Getting Better at the Four Questions

DuFour was right, of course. Spending years getting ready to improve our practice without doing something about our work right now doesn’t work. For one, it’s a disservice to our students today. For another, it doesn’t generate momentum. If you’re considering the four critical questions regarding yearlong processes, take DuFour’s advice: “Don’t do that.”

Instead, ensure quick improvement cycles because it only takes a few weeks to see dramatic results and generate momentum for improvement. Move quickly to action.

Get started — and then get better.

States Turn to Employers to Boost Child Care Benefits

Darreonna Davis, The 19th — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 01:14:00 -0700

This story was originally published by The 19th.

As efforts to expand the child tax credit and provide paid family leave have stalled at the federal level, states are increasingly incentivizing private employers to step in and fill one of the other most painful gaps for working parents: child care.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 17 states offer child care tax credits to “employers that operate or contract out child care services for their employees.” These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

Eric Syverson, a senior policy specialist in the National Conference of State Legislatures’ fiscal affairs program, said the conversation about a child tax credit at the federal level is driving a bipartisan consensus around finding ways in the tax code to help parents and families in need of child care services.

“I think states have now realized, ‘Oh, the federal government temporarily and now is considering again another increase in these tax credits — child tax credit, child and dependent care tax credit, the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit]. We could also benefit from that increase if we enact our own.’ And that’s what we’re seeing a lot of states now considering,” Syverson said.

He added that the biggest beneficiaries of state tax credits are large corporations that can afford child care costs. Even with the credit’s growing popularity, a relatively small percentage of companies take advantage of it. Syverson attributes that to the high costs of establishing a child care facility and a general lack of awareness among larger businesses about the tax credit. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 12 percent of all workers had access to child care benefits through their employer in 2023.

Jessica Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Upwards, a child care marketplace that connects families to child care providers, assists child care providers with business needs, and helps businesses and government entities create child care benefits programs for their employees. Chang said her company operates among the key stakeholders in child care: employers, government, families and child care providers.

Initially, Upwards may collaborate with employers by matching employees with nearby child care providers, a more feasible and cost-efficient option than building an on-site facility. The company can also use data from employees to help customize child care benefits. For example, if Upwards notices employees are calling off work to care for their children, they may recommend providing backup care credits to allow families to find providers at non-traditional hours.

“By partnering with Upwards, we have been able to help our [employees] find trusted providers who are able to accommodate the varying work schedules found at our properties,” Susan Loveday, the vice president of human resources at Dollywood Parks and Resorts, told The 19th. “Additionally, to help with the cost of child care, we provide a monthly stipend to those [employees] whose children are cared for by an Upwards provider.”

To Chang, child care as an employee benefit could resemble health insurance — or become even more important.

“That’s why you actually need to have participation between both employers and government in order to really normalize it and say, ‘This is not a social issue. This is actually an economic issue. This isn’t a mom issue. This is a family issue,’” Chang said. “We’re hearing from employers, for example, they’re not trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna try this, and if it doesn’t work, we’re backing out.’ They’re actually saying, ‘How do we make this successful so there’s no longer an issue? How do we do this for two and three years because we want to make sure that it’s done correctly?’ And that is a significant shift from, say, just checking the box.”

Federal action on child care and other family policies has been slow to advance. Last month, the Senate voted against a bigger child tax credit. Also, federal law does not guarantee workers paid days off for parental, medical and family caregiving responsibilities.

But there have been efforts at the federal level to encourage companies to aid employees with child care, a move that has support from both Democrats and Republicans.

In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, legislation that allocated $50 billion to companies expanding semiconductor manufacturing and research and offering child care to their employees.

When President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, in a debate with former President Donald Trump, he said, “We should significantly increase the child care tax credit. We should significantly increase the availability of women and men, or single parents, to be able to go back to work. And we should encourage businesses to hold, to have child care facilities,” as ways to deal with the child care crisis.

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative group that crafted Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for former President Donald Trump’s potential second term in office, calls for Congress to encourage on-site employee child care, saying it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.”

Some experts argue, however, that employer-sponsored child care is only a temporary solution to the child care crisis — and one that poses equity concerns.

For Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the family policy think tank Capita and the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” employer-sponsored health insurance and its “uneven results” being mirrored in child care is something people should scrutinize. Haspel writes, “The only real solution to America’s child care needs is a system of choice that is funded by a permanent stream of public dollars,” and employer-based taxes is a way to start collecting those funds.

“We have a lot of precedents now at the state and local level of fair ways to fund more affordable, accessible, high-quality child care,” Haspel said, “In Vermont, they are funding a major child care reform bill via a small payroll tax, 0.44 percent, 75 percent of which is borne by the employer, and business owner after business owners went to the legislature and essentially said, ‘Tax us. This is important, this is worth it.’ That’s the kind of employer activity we need.”

Similarly, he said, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Portland have all levied taxes on high-income households to help pay for child care.

“When we care about something and decide it has enough societal value — whether public schools or roads or parks — we find the money,” Haspel said.

Casey Peeks, the senior director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP), believes employers should be more active as child care funding advocates, citing from the Council for Strong America’s report that the child care crisis costs the United States $122 billion every year in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue. She sees child care as both an economic and social issue.

“I describe it as a public good because I am not a parent, but I still benefit from child care. Every day I take the Metro to work, I benefit from the fact that my Metro driver, my bus driver, has their child in a safe, high-quality child care program so that they can go to work, and I can get to work,” Peeks said. “I definitely think there’s a role for businesses to play, and it’s in their best interest that we don’t have a child care crisis. … I think that whatever employers offer should, hopefully, be on top of whatever is provided through public investment.”

Another aspect of the child care crisis is supply. A June 2024 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that, despite the increasing cost of child care, child care workers earn an average of $14.60 per hour. The Chicago Fed attributes decreasing supply to the low pay and high responsibility of the job; child care employment in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 9 percent below pre-pandemic levels.

Anna Lovejoy, director of early childhood policy at CAP, acknowledges the effort being made by states to address the child care crisis, but isn’t convinced incentivizing businesses to provide care helps with the supply issue and may potentially create equity issues.

“When you do tie child care to employment, if someone loses their job or chooses to step away from their job, then they don’t have child care in the interim while they’re looking for work,” Lovejoy said. “And so that causes a disadvantage to families. I think, also, it just creates sort of an equity issue for those who have jobs versus don’t have jobs, have child care versus don’t have child care.”

How AI Can Foster Creative Thinking in the Classroom and Beyond

Abbie Misha — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

For many years, educators have envisioned personalized learning as a way to tailor education to each student's unique needs. With advances in artificial intelligence, this vision is becoming a reality. AI has the potential to transform classrooms by offering personalized learning experiences that align with individual strengths, interests and learning needs.

At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on fostering creativity and authenticity in student work. AI can play a pivotal role in supporting the creative process, from generating ideas to refining projects. By making the creative process more explicit and accessible, AI empowers students to overcome obstacles and express their unique perspectives. This approach not only boosts engagement but also prepares students for a future where creative thinking and problem-solving are indispensable skills.

Brian Johnsrud
Director of Education Learning and Advocacy, Adobe

Recently, EdSurge spoke with Brian Johnsrud, the director of education learning and advocacy at Adobe, about using educational tools that not only harness the power of AI but also uphold the creative integrity of students and teachers. He highlights how AI can help personalize learning by allowing students to present their understanding and ideas in diverse and individualized ways. This shift from standardized assignments to personalized projects can make learning more engaging and relevant for each student.

EdSurge: How can educators safely and responsibly leverage AI for more personalized learning?

Johnsrud: The dream of learning personalization has been around for decades. The first phase really focused on getting the right content to the right student at the right time. Now, with AI, we're in the second phase, which isn't just about personalizing content but also about how students present their understanding and share their knowledge. Because a hallmark of creativity is uniqueness. So if we want students to be doing creative thinking, then 30 assignments done by 30 different students should all look different.

As for deploying AI safely and responsibly, schools are paying attention to a number of things right now. The first step is to check if the AI tool is actually designed for education specifically. If it wasn't made for the classroom, it probably wasn't made to improve learning. It won’t necessarily have those pedagogical pieces baked in or the accessibility and other edtech integrations that you need.

Check if the AI tool is actually designed for education specifically. If it wasn't made for the classroom, it probably wasn't made to improve learning. It won’t necessarily have those pedagogical pieces baked in or the accessibility and other edtech integrations that you need.

— Brian Johnsrud

Part of being designed for safety and responsibility includes ensuring that the tools don't train their models on student or teacher projects because the creative work you develop as a teacher or student in the classroom should be respected and protected. If you're using a tool that benefits or takes inspiration from your creative masterpiece, it's not truly aligned with core creative values and academic integrity.

In what ways does AI help foster creativity while ensuring that student work remains authentic?

AI can support any part of the creative process. If a student is stuck in brainstorming, AI can help generate multiple ideas. If another student is good at brainstorming but needs help refining their work, AI can act as a thought partner, providing critique. This is what's exciting about AI designed for creativity! It makes the steps of the creative process explicit and helps students overcome obstacles. It removes that fear of the blank canvas.

I hope AI helps shift the focus from teachers being the content creators to students taking on that role. As an example inspired by my time as a social studies teacher, instead of asking students to write a paragraph about continuity and change in a historical era, you could have them choose an era, pick a topic that shows continuity, and design an imaginary propaganda poster from that period. The benefits of this creative assignment are clear to every educator. But with rigid standards and a packed curriculum, it's challenging to dedicate two weeks to it. The good news is, with AI, you could complete this assignment in just 30 minutes during class.

Interestingly, we crave authenticity more than ever in the age of AI. AI tools are moving beyond the basic prompt-and-result, “grab and go” approach. They're becoming integrated into our creative workflows, allowing us to bring our best ideas to life and express ourselves more genuinely. The goal isn't for AI to do the work for us but to help us create more authentic, meaningful content so we can be impactful storytellers. As a teacher, you should be able to see each student's unique voice in the work they produce.

The goal isn't for AI to do the work for us but to help us create more authentic, meaningful content so we can be impactful storytellers.

— Johnsrud

How do AI literacy and creative thinking equip students for future job market demands?

In just a few years, AI skills have become essential. The 2024 Work Trend Index Report found that 66 percent of industry leaders wouldn't hire someone without AI skills. It's amazing how quickly this has become a hiring dealbreaker. In that same report, 71 percent of leaders said they're more likely to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them. For students, this means having AI skills can level the playing field with more seasoned professionals.

At the same time, creativity and creative thinking are also in high demand. The World Economic Forum's 2023 Future of Jobs Report highlighted creative thinking as a top skill for the future. The creator economy is booming, with 200,000 new creative jobs created in the United States in 2023 alone. Students who can combine AI skills with creative problem-solving are able to seize some pretty incredible opportunities.

Research has shown that the more students are able to create, the more they thrive. And AI opens up more opportunities for student creation. A 2019 Gallup report found that educators who focus on creativity and use technology in transformative ways see significant gains — students are more engaged, demonstrate better critical thinking, retain more, make connections between subjects and achieve deeper learning. For educators, seeing students excited and proud of their work is incredibly rewarding, especially in a time of increased teacher burnout.

How can educators easily incorporate creative thinking into their lessons?

Start by identifying areas in your curriculum where students need to dive deep into a concept or fully demonstrate their understanding. These are the moments where creative activities can replace traditional methods like note-taking or multiple-choice questions and garner a much wider and deeper set of learning outcomes.

To Address Climate Anxiety, Consider How Students Get Their News on the Issue

Alison J. Head — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 01:00:00 -0700

College students around the world have deep-seated fears, if not despair about the existential threat of climate change — fears they may have harbored since childhood. As the frequency of severe weather events increases and the Earth’s temperature inches upward, emotions have intensified for a lot of students in the United States and it turns out that many keep their concerns about living on a warming planet to themselves.

At Project Information Literacy (PIL), the nonprofit independent research institute I lead, a group of library and information science and new media researchers — including myself — conduct national research about the information seeking behavior of college students and recent graduates. As the director and a principal investigator at PIL with 25 years of experience as a professor of new media and communication theory, I'm focused on investigating what it’s like to be a student in the digital age.

Earlier this year, we surveyed nearly 1,600 undergraduate students from nine U.S. colleges and universities as part of a larger study on how people living in America encounter and respond to climate change news and information. Our survey delved into why some students are distrustful or ambivalent while others still have hope in the midst of gloom. This research was part of a yearlong study we led, examining how our sharply divergent attitudes and beliefs about climate change are shaped by news and information we encounter, curate, engage with and share.

According to our survey data, 78 percent of the students who responded indicated that climate change made them anxious about their future and 88 percent reported that they are anxious for future generations. As one respondent put it in an open response question, “This is our future, and we’re watching it be destroyed.” Another wrote: “There has been so much damage and loss of life as a result of climate change that I feel as though I’m becoming numb to it — it’s just the new normal, especially for my generation.”

Amid the anxiety, however, are notable glimmers of hope. Of our survey respondents, 90 percent agreed that humanity has the ability to mitigate climate change, 78 percent believed in the power of individual action and more than 80 percent were motivated to be part of the climate change solution.

There’s good news in findings like these for educators looking for opportunities to affect change. Even if students say they are “sad,” “worried,” “anxious” and “angry” about living on a planet in peril, many are taking individual steps to fight climate change, no matter how small they seem. Hannah Ritchie, senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at “Our World in Data” refers to the growing attention to do something about climate change as “urgent optimism.” Ritchie suggests reframing how we talk about climate change and that developing a sense of optimism and hope can be steps toward collective action.

In an opinion essay published by “Scientific American,” Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, associate professor at Colby College wrote that the key to talking with students about climate change is letting them express their feelings and fears before introducing any scientific facts. That’s when discussions can happen and students can see how community climate action amplifies solutions, which can then counter despair, inform policy making and spark hope.

If faculty, librarians and administrators at colleges and universities want to bring more attention to climate change, it’s critical to understand not just what students know about the climate crisis but how they know it and how this shapes their beliefs and attitudes. How do students encounter and respond to the topic of climate change in the media, in conversations with others, and in relation to themselves?

When analyzing our survey data, we found that most student respondents curate information streams that include climate change news, but they are not consumed by it. While they followed news of all kinds, most said they had read, listened to, or heard only “some” or “a little” climate change news during the past week.

One reason for this may be the bleak tone of climate change coverage by the media. More than three-quarters of the student sample agreed with the statement, “The media focuses more on the negative impacts of climate change rather than solutions.” What appears lacking in most climate coverage from left- or right-leaning sources alike is not so much a sense of urgency, but possible solutions and adaptations offering a way forward.

An earlier PIL study about how students engage with the news involved a survey of 5,844 undergraduates at 11 American colleges, found that the college classroom is an influential incubator for discussing news and interpreting current events. In that study, seven in 10 respondents to our survey said they had learned of news about a range of topics in discussions with professors during the preceding week.

From open responses to our current survey, we learned that the college classroom is also a crucial source of information for helping students learn about climate change and what role they might play in doing something about it. As one student put it, “hearing about climate change makes me want to be part of a solution, it’s why I’m studying environmental science.”

While a majority of students say they had similar opinions about climate change as people in their orbit, including family and friends, their participation in the public square was notably limited. Only 26 percent of students said they shared ideas or links to climate change news and information through in-person conversations or on social media in the month prior to taking the survey.

This contradiction is one of the complexities that surfaced from our findings about climate change discourse: Students are motivated to be part of the solution but they’re not actively talking with like-minded people in their lives about how they could collectively take action.

Surprisingly, many of the students we surveyed say they trust the veracity of climate scientists. This kind of trust gets parlayed into making efficient decisions about truthfulness of climate information: A significant majority (82 percent) agreed scientists understand the causes of climate change, and more than half believed most news about the climate crisis was credible.

Many students also expressed that they combined their innate trust with other methods of verifying the reliability of news, like comparing one source with another for fact-checking. While growing up, many say they’ve learned about media and information literacy and have made source evaluation a habitual practice. This finding confirms the success of librarians’ research instruction with students.

Since the rising generation of college students will be the ones to live with the consequences of climate change decisions we make now, knowing their perspective is vital for addressing climate change today. Given that many feel overwhelmed by anxiety and despair, we must figure out how to transform their concerns and fears into a sense that we are not doomed and that collective action is still possible and desperately needed.

The snapshot of our survey about how college students respond to climate change tells us they have devoted considerably more attention to thinking about climate change than their counterparts in the general population have. Higher education faculty and administrators have a critical role to play in helping students gain a sense of agency as we confront a global climate challenge.

The classroom may be the best place for faculty to start. Class discussions about climate change news can help students see connections between their news practices and their academic work, while showing that familiarity with news is a social practice and a form of civic engagement. Several studies in the social sciences and sciences have shown discussions like these can build critical thinking and disciplinary knowledge.

There is still much work to be done to help students translate climate anxiety into shared action. But as one student wrote: “It’s very easy to feel hopeless about a situation you don’t directly have control over, but progress always starts from the bottom.”

How Rising Higher Ed Costs Change Student Attitudes About College

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 12:04:33 -0700

ST. PAUL, Minn. — At the end of each school year at Central High School, seniors grab a paint pen and write their post-graduation plans on a glass wall outside the counseling office.

For many, that means announcing what college they’ve enrolled in. But the goal is to celebrate whatever path students are choosing, whether at a college or not.

“We have a few people that are going to trade school, we have a few people that are going to the military, a few people who wrote ‘still deciding,’” said Lisa Beckham, a staffer for the counseling center, as she helped hand out markers in May as the school year was winding down. Others, she said, are heading straight to a job.

Talking to the students as they signed, it was clear that one factor played an outsized role in the choice: the high cost of college.

“I’m thinking about going to college in California, and my grandparents all went there for a hundred dollars a semester and went into pretty low-paying jobs, but didn't spend years in debt because it was easy to go to college,” said Maya Shapiro, a junior who was there watching the seniors write up their plans. “So now I think it is only worth going to college if you're going to get a job that's going to pay for your college tuition eventually, so if you’re going to a job in English or history you might not find a job that’s going to pay that off.”

When I told her I was an English major back in my own college years, she quickly said, “I’m sorry.”

Even students going to some of the most well-known colleges are mindful of cost.

Harlow Tong, who was recruited by Harvard University to run track, said he had planned to go to the University of Minnesota and is still processing his decision to join the Ivy League.

“After the decision it really hit me that it's really an investment, and every year it feels like it's getting less and less worth the cost,” he said.

A new book lays out the changing forces shaping what students are choosing after high school, and argues for a change in the popular narrative around higher education.

The book is called “Rethinking College,” by longtime journalist and Los Angeles Times opinion writer Karin Klein. She calls for an end to “degree inflation,” where jobs require a college degree even if someone without a degree could do the job just as well. And she advocates for more high school graduates to take gap years to find out what they want to do before enrolling in college, or to seek out apprenticeships in fields that may not need college.

But she admits the issue is complicated. She said one of her own daughters, who is now 26, would have benefitted from a gap year. “The problem was the cost was a major factor,” Klein told me. “She was offered huge financial aid by a very good school, and I said, ‘We don’t know if you take a gap year if that offer is going to be on the table. And I can’t afford this school without that offer.’”

Hear more from Klein, including about programs she sees as models for new post-grad options, as well as from students at Central High School, on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below. It’s the latest episode of our Doubting College podcast series.

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With Kindergarten Readiness on the Decline, Some Districts Try New Interventions

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 02:00:00 -0700

Four years ago this month, one of the most devastating wildfires in Oregon’s history erupted across the southern portion of the state.

As the COVID pandemic raged, leaving children out of schools and away from regular routines and social interactions, the fire only magnified the disruption. It destroyed thousands of homes in the agricultural towns that make up the Phoenix-Talent School District, displacing hundreds of families and closing as many businesses.

The wildfire, as with any natural disaster, had many ripple effects throughout the region. One that the district is still grappling with is the impact on young children. For the last few years, children have been entering kindergarten without some of the basic skills and abilities that had once been commonplace.

“It’s hard to separate the fire and pandemic,” says Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning at Phoenix-Talent School District. “The fire really exaggerated the learning losses and learning gaps of the pandemic. It made them even more visible, and it made them last longer.”

During the pandemic, many early learning programs and preschools — already a scarce resource in the area, Lambert says — shuttered temporarily. Then the fire, which damaged some early learning facilities, forced further closures. The two events prevented many children from accessing high-quality, in-person early care and education opportunities before kindergarten.

Plus, Lambert says, some of their families lost work, hurting them economically. Many of their parents were experiencing mental health challenges. Their households were filled with stress.

The combination of all of these factors helps explain the state of the district’s recent cohorts of incoming kindergarteners, she says. Many have lacked the social skills to interact with their peers, the ability to follow instructions and stick to a routine, the attention spans to sit through an entire story read aloud in class, Lambert says. Few had early learning experiences prior to starting school, she adds, and even concepts like which direction to turn the pages in a book are foreign to many of them.

Phoenix-Talent may be a more dramatic example, given the added impacts of the wildfire in 2020, but it is far from an anomaly. Across the country, elementary school teachers and leaders report that children are entering kindergarten worse off than their peers of the past. They have underdeveloped social-emotional and fine motor skills. Some are not yet able to use the restroom independently.

“The news is sobering,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, an assessment company that recently published research showing that the nation’s youngest learners, especially, are still struggling to rebound from the pandemic’s disruption to learning and development. “The impact of the pandemic is lasting way longer than we anticipated.”

The differences are hard to miss. More children are having trouble separating from their parents or caregivers when they go to school, for example, because maybe they haven’t had much or any time apart from them until now.

“We see a lot of concern from parents and from teachers,” says Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons, which operates more than 600 early care and education centers in the U.S.

Many educators and researchers, in interviews, point out that these developmental differences may not all be a result of the pandemic and the lower rates of preschool enrollment that followed it. Children’s reliance on screens, including very young children — even infants and toddlers — is likely a factor.

Robertson believes screens are responsible for much of the disruption to fine motor development. Rather than reading physical books, some children are having stories read aloud to them from a phone. Rather than doing arts and craft activities, which give them a chance to practice holding a crayon or using scissors, they’re swiping on tablets.

“We’re having consequences of screens that we didn’t predict,” Robertson notes.

The good news is that even if children are “behind,” that can easily — and sometimes quickly — change. They pick up skills fast at such a young age, especially when learning is steeped in curiosity and wonder, Robertson says.

Children need certain skills and competencies to be ready to show up, participate and thrive in kindergarten, educators and child development experts say. But many kids — and an increasing number over the last four years — lack access to the resources and experiences that introduce those skills to them before they start elementary school. Noting this worrying downward trend, many school districts have stepped in with their own solutions to support early learners as they prepare to start school. We take a close look at two of them.

Oregon’s Jump Start Kindergarten

During the pandemic, leaders at the Oregon Department of Education understood that early learning programs were critical for preparing children to transition to kindergarten and that those programs were much less accessible and available to families at the time, creating a “critical need,” says Marc Siegel, communications director for the state’s department of education, in a written response to EdSurge.

Leaders “understood that additional support was necessary to ensure our youngest learners were prepared for the social, emotional and academic demands of public school environments after a prolonged period without in-person learning opportunities,” he adds.

Those sentiments led to the creation of Jump Start Kindergarten, a state-funded program that utilizes Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act to provide incoming kindergartners and their families with an “on-ramp” to kindergarten.

A teacher guides an incoming kindergartener through a matching activity during a Jump Start Kindergarten lesson. (Photo courtesy of Phoenix-Talent School District.)

The Jump Start program varies based on the needs of each school and community where it’s implemented, Siegel says, but all include a few key components. Every Jump Start program has a half-day classroom experience for at least two weeks, for a minimum of 30 hours total, characterized by hands-on activities, establishing classroom routines, and building relationships with other children and educators. Additionally, each program offers partnerships with community-based organizations and provides experiences to promote family engagement, such as playground meet-and-greets, a school-based scavenger hunt or an opportunity to meet school staff.

Phoenix-Talent School District has offered the Jump Start Kindergarten program during the last three summers, with noticeable results, Lambert says. It has also expanded the program in a few ways.

The first year — summer 2022 — the district’s program prioritized children with special needs who had limited access to early special education services. During those few weeks, they learned to follow a routine, to line up as a class, to use a paper towel dispenser, Lambert recalls.

In the second and third year, the district expanded the program by opening it up to any child who didn’t attend preschool or another early learning program and increased the duration to five or six weeks. This summer, the program enrolled 34 kids. (Phoenix-Talent was estimating 140 kindergarteners this fall, and Lambert says 50 or 60 slots would’ve been ideal.)

Children sit and listen during story time in two classes of the Jump Start Kindergarten program. (Photo courtesy of Phoenix-Talent School District.)

The children who attended Jump Start Kindergarten seem to be “much more prepared” and more committed to showing up to school each day, Lambert shares. “We saw a big difference in attendance. That impacts academics, too. Students don’t learn if they’re not at school.”

Overall, kindergarteners in the district had an attendance rate of 59 percent in the 2023-24 school year, whereas the students that had attended Jump Start the prior summer came 78 percent of the time. (It’s too early to collect data for the 2024-25 school year.)

The Jump Start program has been a boon at Phoenix-Talent, especially now that staff have figured out how best to run it. Its future, however, hangs in the balance, with ESSER funding expiring at the end of this month and replacement funding from the state uncertain.

“We’re pretty sad about it,” Lambert says. “It helps kids — and their parents — be more comfortable starting school. … I think we’re going to need that for many, many years.”

Baby Bags, Badging and Beyond

Without a designated program from the state, other districts have had to be a bit more scrappy.

Leaders in Manheim Central School District, in Manheim, Pennsylvania, realized that the pandemic would impact even the children not yet in school, and that they would need extra support.

“We knew we had to do things differently,” says Tracy Fasick, the recently retired director of curriculum and instruction for the small, rural district.

They came up with a multi-pronged strategy that would engage families early — as early as possible, in fact — and would create better communication and consistency with local early learning programs.

One of those strategies was “baby bags.” When a baby was born in the district — somewhere on the order of 210 to 240 times per year, Fasick says — she would drop off a bag that included resources on local programs and early intervention services, some toys and learning materials, and a sippy cup and bib with the district’s mascot.

“Right away, it establishes that this is a future child who will come to our school,” Fasick says of the bags. “It’s welcoming.”

In the district’s kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms, teachers use “badging,” where kids don’t get letter grades but badges for different skills and competencies they’ve mastered. For example, in those early elementary grades, a child can earn a badge if they achieve certain literacy and numeracy goals.

Fasick wanted to get the district’s future students more accustomed to that system, so she met with all of the preschool leaders in the area and helped them develop age- and developmentally-appropriate badges for the preschoolers, working backwards from the badges available for kindergarteners. Now, those programs offer badging, too. Kids can earn them for gross motor skills — if they can hop and skip — and for zipping or buttoning their own coats, for sitting still and following directions.

The preschool programs now, Fasick says, “are very aware of what we’re teaching in kindergarten, so they can prepare [the children] for what is going to be happening in kindergarten.”

She adds: “Kids like the badging. It’s something tangible. … Learning is celebrated, which helps a lot.”

As a final push in the lead-up to kindergarten, Manheim Central provides families with “Countdown to Kindergarten” boxes at their kindergarten registration.

Aimee Ketchum, a pediatric occupational therapist and professor of early childhood development at the nearby Cedar Crest College, created the boxes to give families a crash course in everything their child would be expected to know by the time they start kindergarten.

Ideally, the kids have six months to work through all the activities in their box, which includes a planner (detailing two activities to do each month), a pencil box with fine motor manipulatives, seed packets for planting, a ruler to measure the growth of those seeds and eventual flowers, activities and scissors for developing cutting skills, note cards to practice writing their names and an index card and string with which to practice tying a shoe.

Ketchum, who assembles the boxes in her garage with her family, clarifies that they are not intended to replace more formal early learning experiences, but rather to supplement it for those who don’t have access.

“Children need access to high-quality early childhood education, and too many of them aren’t getting it,” she says. “This is an attempt to provide some tools [and] some hands-on activities, and give parents an awareness of what is expected and an opportunity to practice” those skills with their children.

Pretty much every parent and caregiver wants the best for their child, Fasick notes, but many don’t know where to begin. The boxes offer guidance.

“Families are grateful for anything they can get that will help their kid,” Fasick says. “This is an easy way to help them.”

Scaling Evidence-Based Solutions for Learning Recovery

Abbie Misha — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

Since the pandemic, the urgency of designing and scaling evidence-based products to support learning recovery has become more pronounced. Educational institutions are grappling with unprecedented disruptions and widening achievement gaps, making the need for effective, research-backed interventions critical. The focus is not only on creating these products but also ensuring they are adopted and effectively implemented in schools and classrooms across the country.

The Leveraging Evidence to Accelerate Recovery Nationwide (LEARN) Network, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, is at the forefront of this effort. Led by SRI International, a nonprofit with a strong track record of bringing innovations to market, the LEARN Network focuses on promoting learning growth by enhancing the use of evidence-based educational products.

The Network also comprises four product teams dedicated to adapting and positioning evidence-based products that boost literacy and math learning to make them more useful and accessible for educators. By providing learning and coaching opportunities, the LEARN Network aims to build the capacity of these teams and others in the field to equitably and sustainably scale educational products. This involves understanding educators’ problems of practice and needs and systems decision-making processes in product procurement, and developing tools for researchers, developers and educators to support the widespread adoption of effective solutions.

Jessica Mislevy
Director of Digital Learning and Technology Policy, SRI Education

Recently, EdSurge spoke with education researchers Kerry Friedman and Jessica Mislevy about the importance of integrating evidence-based practices, educator input and a systems lens from the earliest stages of product development. Friedman, a former teacher with 12 years of experience in research and technical assistance, focuses on strengthening educators' and system leaders' ability to use evidence in practice. As the project director for the LEARN Network, she works with researchers and developers on capacity building and design of evidence-based products and programs. Mislevy is the director of digital learning and technology policy at SRI Education, specializing in mixed-methods evaluations of products designed to improve student outcomes in K-12 and post-secondary education. She is a co-principal investigator with the LEARN Network, focusing on educators’ effective adoption and scaling of evidence-based practices and programs.

EdSurge: Why are evidence-based products and programs so vital, especially at this point in time in America’s schools?

Mislevy: We've all seen how the COVID-19 pandemic upended education systems across the country, interrupting learning for students and exacerbating existing inequalities in education. We're seeing this reflected in the 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress with the first-ever decline recorded in mathematics and the largest average score decline in reading in decades. Research shows that the quality of learning products and programs matters for student outcomes. Now more than ever, it's important to get those products that can improve education outcomes for all learners and eliminate persistent achievement gaps in districts and schools. Unfortunately, many effective products don't reach educators due to an overwhelming supply of products. It can be hard to select products that are effective and well-matched to students' needs and contexts, as well as affordable and easy to use.

What key considerations should researchers and developers keep in mind while designing and scaling products and programs?

Friedman: When considering scale, researchers often view it as the final step. However, designing a scalable innovation begins with the initial idea. This is where our framework for the LEARN Network starts. We adapted SRI International's Invent-Apply-Transition (I-A-T) framework to better fit the education sector, incorporating Liberatory Design principles focused on equity and systems thinking.

Kerry Friedman
Senior Researcher, SRI Education

Both the I-A-T framework and Liberatory Design emphasize the importance of understanding users' needs from the start. This understanding forms the foundation of the Invent stage of the I-A-T framework. In the Apply stage, you assess the broader market, identifying key players, infrastructure, policies, and competition to refine your innovation. Finally, in the Transition phase, you consider how to scale your product, envisioning it at a systems level and exploring pathways to create a financially viable approach.

We created the Learn to Scale Toolkit to guide researchers through these stages and support the scaling process. We also profiled various products on their journeys from development to scale in our Stories of Scaling.

How is the Network working to increase the use of evidence-based products and programs in schools?

Mislevy: We're coming at it from both the supply and the demand side. On the supply side, the LEARN Network provides capacity building to researchers and developers in scaling their evidence-based products. So we support them in adapting their products while considering educator context, decision-making processes and usability. This has included a mix of one-on-one and cross-team coaching and consultation sessions to provide tools and training while also supporting and promoting team building and collaboration. In addition to SRI scaling experts, we also bring together other expert voices to contribute to these conversations. Then on the demand side, we're working to better understand the needs and barriers that educators face in adopting and scaling evidence-based products. We translate these findings into actionable takeaways for developers to ensure their products are more likely to be adopted and scaled.

Does the Network have any insights into school and district needs or how they select programs and products?

Free LEARN Network resources for researchers, developers and educators:

The LEARN to Scale Toolkit: a comprehensive resource for researchers and developers based on the Invent-Apply-Transition framework
Stories of Scaling: a profile series highlighting impactful researchers, entrepreneurs and evidence-based products
The LEARN Network Blog: articles, podcasts and Q&As featuring experts and thought leaders from across the U.S.
LEARN Network Research: action-oriented research briefs focused on product development, procurement and more

Mislevy: The LEARN Network conducted a focused study on K-12 education procurement practices to better understand how decision-makers determine which products to adopt in their schools and districts and how evidence is used in those decisions. We conducted in-depth interviews with a broad array of education leaders and other education stakeholders, and also conducted nationally representative surveys of public school and district leaders through the RAND American Educator Panels. We examined what motivates schools and districts to procure products, who is involved in the decision-making process and what sources of information leaders look to when selecting products. For example, we found that routine curriculum review cycles often motivated educators to procure core curriculum materials, whereas reviews of student outcome data more often led to the procurement of supplemental materials.

We also saw that teachers are reported as most involved in identifying and evaluating prospective products for their schools and districts, while school and district leaders are more involved in making final decisions about which products to select. In terms of usage, research and evidence were amongst the more influential sources for informing procurement decisions, though we found that recommendations from fellow education leaders and end users actually ranked higher. Our research has important implications for product developers so they really understand the systemic forces that influence when and why products are procured, as well as who is involved throughout that procurement process to increase the likelihood of product uptake and scale. We recently published on the LEARN Network website the first of several planned research briefs, which features lessons for developers ready to bring their products to market or scale to broader audiences.

Do These Disappearing, 100-Year-Old Schools Hold a Vital Lesson for American Education?

Daniel Mollenkamp — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

Sometimes, it takes an unlikely friendship to change the world.

For American education, one of those alliances started in the early 20th century. That’s when a ludicrously successful retailer-turned-philanthropist, Julius Rosenwald, met the prominent educator Booker T. Washington. The pair decided to work together, hoping to improve education for Black students in the segregated South. Their collaboration created nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” — across 15 Southern and border states — between 1917 and 1937.

By some accounts, this was a massive success.

These schools caused a “sharp narrowing” of the difference in educational achievement of white and Black students in the South.

But it was a “watershed moment,” according to a recent book published about the schools, “A Better Life for Their Children,” for another reason, too: Those who attended the schools would later actively participate in the Civil Rights Movement, overturning segregation as an official American policy. The list of notable alumni includes longtime U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP who was assassinated in 1963.

Today, most of those schools have dissolved into history, and only around 500 still exist, in varying states of upkeep.

Andrew Feiler, a Georgia-born photographer, visited and photographed 105 of the extant schools and spoke with those connected to the schools and their legacy to publish “A Better Life for Their Children.” His book, released in 2021, is currently the basis of a traveling exhibition.

These days, race and educational opportunity still seem troublingly linked. NAEP data shows a consistent, three-decade-long gap in student performance in categories like 12th grade math and reading for Black students when compared to white ones. These gaps are often blamed on racial and economic segregation.

Perhaps that’s why some observers have connected Feiler’s exhibition about the past to the racial-educational gap of today, particularly noting the contemporary lack of adequate resources for public schools and the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

So EdSurge pulled Feiler aside to ask him what, if any, lesson he thinks the Rosenwald Schools might have for educators today.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: When and why did you decide to take on the project?

Andrew Feiler: I've been a serious photographer most of my life, and about a dozen years ago, I started down this path of taking my work more seriously and, mercifully, being taken more seriously, and I had to figure out what my voice was as a photographer.

I've been very involved in the civic life of my community — I've been very involved in the nonprofit world and the political world — and when I thought about my voice as a photographer, I found myself drawn to topics that were of interest in the course of my civic life.

And so I had done my first photography book, which came out in 2015 — just a portrait of an abandoned college campus. And it uses this emotional disconnect between these familiar education spaces, classrooms and hallways and locker rooms, but they have this veneer of abandonment…

That body of work ended up being about the importance of historically Black colleges and the importance of education as the on-ramp to the American middle class.

And I was thinking about what I was going to do next, and I found myself at lunch with an African American preservationist, and she was the first person to tell me about Rosenwald Schools. And the story shocked me.

I'm a fifth-generation, Jewish Georgian. I've been a civic activist my entire life. The pillars of the Rosenwald Schools’ story — Southern, education, civic, progressive — these are the pillars of my life. How could I have never heard of Rosenwald Schools?

And so I came home and I Googled it, and I found that while there were a number of more academic books on the subject, there was not a comprehensive photographic account of the program, and so I set out to do exactly that. Over the next three and a half years, I drove 25,000 miles across all 15 of the program states. Of the original 4,978 schools, only about 500 survive. Only half of those have been restored, about 105 schools, and the result is this book and this traveling exhibition.

Can I introduce the characters?

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, Quilt Celebrating Restoration. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

Sure. Introduce away.

At the heart of the story are two men.

Julius Rosenwald was born to Jewish immigrants who had fled religious persecution in Germany. He grows up in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from Abraham Lincoln's home. And he rises to become president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, and with innovations like “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back,” he turns Sears into the world's largest retailer in its era, and he becomes one of the earliest and greatest philanthropists in American history.

And his cause is what only later becomes known as “civil rights.”

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia, attends Hampton College and becomes an educator. He is the founder of the historically Black college Tuskegee Institute, originally in Alabama.

These two men met in 1911.

And you have to remember, 1911 was before the Great Migration [the period between the 1910s and the 1970s when millions of Black people poured out of the South and moved to the North, Midwest and West fleeing racial violence and seeking opportunity].

Ninety percent of African Americans live in the South. And public schools for African Americans are mostly shacks, with a fraction of the funding that was afforded public schools for white children.

And that is the need, that's the environment that they find. And these two men like each other, form partnerships, work together, and in 1912 they create this program that becomes known as “Rosenwald Schools.” And over the next 25 years, from 1912 to 1937, they built 4,978 schools across 15 Southern and border states, and the results are transformative.

Having visited so many of the remaining schools, what impression did they leave on you?

... These places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

— Andrew Feiler

Well, the structures have an austere beauty. Their architecture is very vernacular and very local to the region in which they arise. Whether they are restored — or even having a veneer of abandonment — I find them beautiful.

But I think there's another important component.

I knew this was an extraordinary story. It was not clear to me from the beginning, how do you tell it visually? And I started out shooting exteriors of these buildings: One-teacher schools, two-teacher schools, three-teacher schools. These small structures. By the end of the program, they're building one-, two- and three-story red brick buildings.

There's an interesting architectural narrative, but when I found out that only 10 percent of the schools survive — only half of those have been restored — I realized that the historic preservation imperative is a huge, important part of the story, because these spaces, these places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

And once I realized that the preservation narrative was important, then I had to get inside, and suddenly I needed permission. And that's when I meet all of these extraordinary people — former students, former teachers, preservationists, civic leaders — and I bring their connections to this broader Rosenwald School story into this narrative with portraits.

How much of your project’s timing relies on a recently intensified desire to place greater emphasis on preserving Black history? How much of that explains why it’s resonating now?

Let me say a couple things about Rosenwald Schools as a program. First of all, the Rosenwald Schools are one of the most transformative developments in the first half of the 20th century in America. They dramatically reshaped the African American experience, and that dramatically reshapes the American experience.

There are two economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who have done five studies of Rosenwald Schools, and what their data shows is that prior to Rosenwald Schools, there was a large and persistent Black-white education gap in the South. That gap closes precipitously between World War I and World War II, and the single greatest driver of that achievement is growth from all schools. In addition, many of the leaders and foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement come through these schools: Medgar Evers, Maya Angelou, multiple members of the Little Rock Nine who integrate Little Rock Central High, Congressman John Lewis who wrote this extraordinary introduction to my book, all went to Rosenwald Schools, and so the results of this program are transformative.

But to go back to the heart of your question, I think what resonates about this story today is that we live in a divided America, and we often feel that our problems are so intractable, especially those related to race.

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, in 1912, in deeply segregated, deeply Jim Crow America, were reaching across divides, of race, of religion, of region, and they fundamentally transformed this country for the better. And I think the heart of this story speaks to everybody today, driving for social change in America. And individual actions still matter, and that individual actions change the world.

Bay Springs School, Forrest County, Mississippi, 1925-1958. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

So if we take the sweep of your recent projects — I’m thinking of this one and the other book you mentioned, “Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color,” which looked at Morris Brown College — has how you think about education changed in any tangible ways?

I have come out of this work with appreciation for the role that education has played throughout the sweep of American history.

The first taxpayer-funded school was created in America — done in Massachusetts in 1644; that is, 380 years ago. And there's a direct connection between that early commitment to education; the Land Grant College Act, which passed in 1862 and funds colleges all across America; HBCUs, predominantly created in the decades after the Civil War; Rosenwald Schools in the early decades of the 20th century; the educational provisions of the GI Bill, which transform America from relatively poor to relatively prosperous; [and] Brown v. Board of Education, one of the high watermarks of the Civil Rights Movement.

What are we talking about today? College affordability, banning books, circumscribing curriculum.

We have a 380-year tradition in which education has been the backbone of the American Dream, the on-ramp to the American middle class. And then today, that is a tradition at risk, and I think we need to understand and protect the importance of this tradition in our country.

Any parting lessons that educators can learn from this work?

I think what I said earlier is really in the spirit of what you're asking about, which is that the levels of division currently across our country are troubling. And I think it's important for us as Americans to reflect on our history and how we have come together to make America a better place. And the relationship between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, this is one of the earliest collaborations between Blacks and Jews and a cause that only later becomes known as “civil rights.” Their collaboration, their work together, their friendship is a model for how we as individuals can make a difference in our culture. They are reaching across divides of race. They are reaching across divides of religion. They are reaching across divides into a greater region, all of which remain divides in our culture today.

They're reaching across those divides, and they're creating a transformative impact on the country. And I think this is a model for all of us to remember, that we are the change that we seek. We have the capacity to make a difference, and we need to follow in the footsteps of this story to reshape this country for all of us.

How Is Axim Collaborative Spending $800 Million From the Sale of EdX?

Jeffrey R. Young — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly.

“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”

Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.

The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.

So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?

EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.

Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.

“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”

One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”

The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.

Listening Tour

When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.

One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what's keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”

Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.

“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we're supporting.”

One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They're developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”

Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.

Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.

He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.

While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.

When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”

Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.

“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”

His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”

For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.

“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it's just hard to come by in a space where there's a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”

What Happens When a School Closes Its Library?

Nadia Tamez-Robledo — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 01:00:00 -0700

HOUSTON — On a Saturday morning in August 2023, a crowd gathered outside the Houston Independent School District administration building with protest signs in hand. The brutal, sticky heat of Texas summer already had people wiping sweat from their brows and handing out bottled water from ice-filled coolers.

Teachers, parents and politicians took turns at the microphone, united in their criticism of the controversial state takeover of Texas’ largest school district. One fear expressed was about how the mostly Black and Latino students at 28 schools would fare under a plan created by new Superintendent Mike Miles that would require school libraries to cease, in essence, functioning as libraries.

Demonstrators gather in August 2023 in protest of Houston ISD's plan to close libraries in schools. Photo by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

Instead, they would become “team centers,” where teachers would send disruptive students to work independently. The most high-achieving students would be funneled there, too, where they could do worksheets at their own pace and free up teachers to focus on everyone else.

Taylor Hill, a student at Wheatley High School, would experience the change firsthand. Her school is located in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood and serves a student body that is nearly 100 percent classified as economically disadvantaged.

The Texas Education Agency awards letter grades to schools and districts based on test scores and other student performance metrics. When Wheatley High received a seventh “F” rating from the Texas Education Agency in 2019, it triggered the state takeover of the district. A Houston lawmaker championed the 2015 law that created the mandatory takeover process, something he saw as a way to hold the district accountable for continually low-performing schools.

At the protest, Hill stepped up to the podium and spoke into the microphone, talking over a crescendo of buzzing cicadas. The library at her school is a refuge, she said.

“I live in Fifth Ward. There's not a lot there, but what is there should not be turned into a detention center, especially when I am constantly there,” Hill told the crowd. “I read a lot, and I just feel like that is not what needs to happen.”

Unfortunately for Hill, the new state-appointed superintendent went through with his plan. A year later, the early consequences are becoming clear. School librarians have lost their jobs. Teachers have adopted a district-approved curriculum that some feel is rote and uninspiring. And children are receiving different educations depending on which part of the city they call home — a divide that maps onto Houston’s income and racial disparities.

Man With a Plan for ‘Differentiation’

Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in June 2023, brought in to lead the state takeover and improve academic performance in Houston.

In addition to districts, schools in Texas are individually given A through F grades based partially on standardized test scores. Miles quickly created big and controversial plans to improve scores. One strategy among his planned overhaul — called the New Education System, or NES — was to close libraries at 28 schools out of the district’s 274 total and turn them into “team centers.” It would accomplish two goals, he said: create a place to send “disruptive” students after removing them from class as well as an environment to send high-achieving students for enrichment.

School principals were also given the option to voluntarily adopt the new system, becoming what the district referred to as “NES-aligned.” After adding in those campuses, a total of 85 schools would start fall 2023 under the program.

The problem? Myriad parents and teachers alike hated the idea of closing down libraries and isolating students, especially considering these schools — and the entire school district — serves a student population that’s overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

The map below shows Houston schools that are part of the New Education System with each neighborhood color-coded based on median income. Click on the map to see more information about income in each neighborhood. Areas become more green as income increases and more blue as income decreases.

Map by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.

One was Melissa Yarborough, a teacher at Navarro Middle School in Houston’s East End, which is home to one of the city’s historically Latino neighborhoods. While not targeted as a failing school or assigned to the New Education System, her campus leaders adopted much of district's new curriculum, according to Yarborough. Navarro Middle officially became an NES school in 2024.

Her two children, however, were students at one of the targeted schools, Pugh Elementary in the city’s northeastern Denver Harbor neighborhood. Although, it wasn’t labeled as “failing” when Miles was appointed superintendent. It had an A rating from the state in 2022. Even by Houston ISD’s own calculations, the school is expected to earn a B rating when 2023 and 2024 school “report cards” are released. It was a tougher scoring formula released last year that makes earning high “grades” harder. A lawsuit by Texas school districts over the change has halted the release of 2023 ratings for now, and a second lawsuit is similarly blocking the state from releasing 2024 ratings.

As demonstrators hung back and talked after the protest, Yarborough said she was horrified by the way Miles described his plan to move disruptive students to the library-turned-team-center and tune into lessons via Zoom.

“He said, ‘Imagine. I'm walking in with 150 kids. All the children are working on their own little assignment or whatever, individually or in pairs,’” Yarborough recalled. “He said it to me like it's a beautiful thing.”

Screenshot of teacher and parent Melissa Yarborough speaking during the public comment portion of a board meeting in February. Video courtesy of Houston ISD.

She said Miles sold the idea as “differentiation,” a principle that all teachers learn during their undergraduate training. In essence, it’s the idea that teachers should adjust their lessons to each student’s needs, whether they’re struggling or grasping a concept quickly.

Yarborough said Miles’ plan isn’t effective differentiation, though. Disruptive students will receive a worse education, if the results of pandemic-era Zoom classes are any indicator, she said. And doing worksheets in the library isn’t a reward for high-achievers, she added.

Duncan Klussmann agreed with Yarborough’s assessment. A former superintendent of nearby Spring Branch Independent School District, he is now a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Houston. Ultimately, Klussmann said, Miles’ model is designed to produce higher test scores. But Klussmann is more interested to know what the student experience is in these schools.

“Just because you have higher state test schools, do more students go off to higher ed?” he asked. “Are they successful when they go off to higher ed? Do more students get a technical certification? Do more students go into the military, you know? Do they have a better life after high school? We don't know. We won't know for four, six, 10 years what the effect is of NES schools on students.”

Officials from Houston ISD did not respond to interview or information requests from EdSurge.

Displaced Librarians

When Brandie Dowda was hired at Burrus Elementary, a campus home to mostly Black and Hispanic students, she was the first librarian employed by the school in a decade.

Her tenure wouldn’t last long.

During summer 2023 — the same one during which Houstonians like student Hill and parent Yarborough protested outside the district administration building — Dowda was on vacation when the principal at Burrus informed her that the librarian position was being eliminated. The campus was going to be part of the inaugural New Education System cohort of schools, and the library would be closed.

Dowda found another librarian position in the district at Almeda Elementary and said she was happy at her new school. The library had long been central to life at the campus, and Dowda said students were rarely seen without a book in hand.

But again, her tenure would be short-lived.

Librarian Brandie Dowda poses in front of knitted protest signs before speaking at a board of managers meeting in August 2024. Photo courtesy of Dowda.

Dowda was leaving for work one morning in January 2024 and quickly scrolled through the news feed on her phone before heading out the door when she saw it — a news article announcing that 26 more schools would join the New Education System in the fall of 2024.

Dowda’s school was on the list. “I went, ‘Oh, I get to do this again,’” she recalled. “I found out from the regular news, which if I remember correctly, is also how my principal found out. It's kind of how everybody found out.”

Dowda said that her former library at Burrus wasn’t turned into a team center — a classroom was used instead — but students still weren’t allowed to access the books. Then, in May 2024 at Almeda, she was in the middle of a lesson when movers arrived to begin disassembling the library, she said. As the school year ended, the carpet was left with bald spots where shelves had been removed and the concrete floor underneath showed through. Her students were upset to learn that their library would be closed when they returned in the fall.

The library at Almeda Elementary after bookshelves were removed. Photo courtesy of Brandie Dowda.

Dowda’s story mirrors that of Cheryl Hensley, the former librarian at Lockhart Elementary. Hensley had been retired from her 38-year career in Houston ISD when a friend coaxed her into applying for the librarian position at the campus, which is in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of Third Ward.

Like Dowda at Almeda Elementary, she was at Lockhart for one year before her job was eliminated. Her principal opted into the NES standards believing that, in doing so, decisions about the school would still ultimately be made at the campus level. Hensley found out she lost her job in summer 2023.

“The principal is a super supporter of libraries and books and literature and reading, all over, I mean 100 percent,” Hensley said, “and so she was thinking I would be OK. They told [the principal] they could keep everybody, that everything would be the same and nothing would change.”

Cheryl Hensley poses in the library at Lockhart Elementary, where she was formerly a librarian and where she now volunteers monthly. She says that while the books have not been removed, they are not checked out to students. Photo courtesy of Hensley.

But then Hensley heard from the principal: “She called me in and just said, ‘No, I can't keep you. They told me that I have to turn my library into a team center.’”

Beyond the professional upheaval, Hensley and Dowda worry about what the absence of a school library will mean for students’ success in elementary school and beyond. Third grade is widely noted as a critical time for children to achieve reading proficiency, otherwise putting them at risk of falling behind academically during each subsequent year.

“I teach them to love to read,” Hensley said. “If you're invested so much in reading and math, then you're missing a major component [by closing libraries]. Because if a kid loves to read, they will read more. If a kid loves to read, he will comprehend more. We are part of that solution.”

Hensley said she visited her former colleagues and students at Lockhart monthly during the 2023-24 school year, and students asked her if she was back to reopen the library each time. It has been turned into a team center with about 50 desks, she says, where students are sent if they finish their classwork early.

Hensley said the school’s library, even if it’s not operating as one, still has books thanks to the principal’s actions in 2023. A work crew arrived to remove the shelves — making way for the team center desks — when the principal was at an off-campus meeting, Hensley recalled. The principal returned just in time to tell the crew that nothing was to be taken.

“She said, ‘We'll work that out, because you're not taking the books,’” Hensley says. “She pushed back, and I appreciate her 100 percent because still the library itself at Lockhart is basically intact.”

Houston ISD told Houston Landing that some schools allow students to informally check out books on an “honor system.”

The NES approach might fix the problem of low test scores, she said, “but it's not going to give you a lifetime learner or lifetime reader that will read and comprehend and think for themselves.”

While the district is moving forward with bringing more schools in its New Education System — and closing more libraries in the process — Dowda said that there aren’t any parents or community members she’s heard from who see library closures as a smart move.

“Why are you closing the libraries when you want to improve literacy and reading scores? They have not yet explained to us how that makes sense,” Dowda said. “I'm not the only one who has pointed out that this is not happening in the schools in the west side of Houston, which are the affluent schools that are mostly white. It is happening in the Title I schools with high poverty rates that are populated mostly by African American and Hispanic students.”

Dowda won’t be looking for yet another librarian job within Houston ISD. Instead, she found one in a different school district nearby. She predicts other educators who work at NES schools will do the same.

“I'm going to go to another district that values libraries,” she said, “and where I can have stability in a library and go about my librarian business of helping children find books that they enjoy reading.”

‘It’s Segregation’

It was last November that Yarborough, the Houston teacher and parent, stepped outside the bounds of the new NES curriculum for the final time.

After the summer protest, Yarborough started the 2023-24 school year using the district’s mandated materials. But three months in, she had had enough of watching students in her English language arts class mentally check out from the monotony of the new structure: She read off district-created slides, and then students answered a multiple-choice question by holding up a markerboard where they scribbled an A, B, C or D. For short-answer questions, they wrote on an index card. Over and over, until it was time for a five-question quiz.

Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, 'Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged.'

— Melissa Yarborough

“By November I was like, ‘I'm done with this,’” Yarborough recalls. “They're not learning. I know they can. I'm going to go back to a great lesson.”

For Native American Heritage Month, Yarborough decided to introduce her sixth graders to stories, poems and songs that fit the theme, despite them not being approved for use. Each time she rebelled by using a story or activity in class, even if an observing school administrator had liked the lesson, her supervisor would remind Yarborough the next day not to stray from the slides that were sent over by the district.

Eventually, an assistant principal called Yarborough into her office. She reminded Yarborough that the district’s orders barred teachers at NES-aligned schools like Navarro Middle from giving students quizzes, tests or any assessment outside of what was part of district-provided slideshows.

“It sounded kind of like a threat where she said, ‘I'm telling you before the [executive director] comes and tells you herself,’” Yarborough recalls. “‘You're going to be in big trouble with the ED herself if you don't start doing this now.’”

Yarborough quit her teaching job in January. She now works as a teacher in a nearby district, outside of the NES program. She couldn’t be part of a system that was forcing her to, as Yarborough puts it, treat students like machines.

“I knew they weren't learning. I knew I wasn't preparing them for anything in life besides a STAAR test,” Yarborough says, referencing the state’s annual standardized test, “and I was having to deny their humanity while we did that. I was so stressed, and my stomach was always a knot. I was like, ‘This is horrible. I can't keep doing this.’”

The slideshow model didn’t give her time to help students understand concepts before moving on, or for students to practice a skill on their own. The timed, jam-packed schedule didn’t even leave most kids with time to go to the bathroom, she says.

“They've just been holding up the whiteboard on the multiple-choice question slides, so they haven't been able to read a story and think through it and make mistakes and get feedback on their own,” Yarborough says. “So you have kids who will give up, and they just write any letter on their whiteboard, and it doesn't matter to them. And Mike Miles calls this engagement, but that's just obedience — because when a student is really engaged, it's their mind that's engaged, not their hand with a marker.”

Despite educators’ concerns, district leaders are riding high on data showing that some campuses made huge improvements in their overall accountability ratings — rising by 30 or more points, in some cases — during Miles’ first year at the helm. The district called the increases “remarkable” in a news release, noting the changes made under the New Education System.

While the state has been blocked from releasing annual school accountability scores, Houston ISD crunched the numbers itself and released its campuses’ preliminary scores. Wheatley High School, the source of low scores that triggered the state takeover, will increase from a “D” rating in 2023 to a “B” at the end of the 2024 academic year. The number of schools rated “A” and “B” will more than double during the same period, according to the district, while “D” and “F” campuses will fall to 41 schools in 2024 compared to 121 the previous year.

“We are incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in one year,” Miles said in the news release. “Together with our dedicated teachers, principals, and everyone at HISD, we will continue to provide high-quality instruction that builds on this growth.”

The first year of NES was turbulent, with a seemingly constant stream of new reforms. Protesters spoke out against the overhaul at public meetings, with plans for massive layoffs angering parents. Employee turnover during Miles’ tenure was 33 percent higher than the previous year.

Miles has remained cool under the barrage of criticism — including from a panel of graduating seniors who had firsthand experience under his New Education System. He brushed off the idea that a 9,000-student drop in enrollment was worrisome, telling the Houston Chronicle that the “numbers are changing every day ... but we feel confident that we’re going to keep growing in our enrollment until September.”

In the same article, a parent said her children had “hollow zombie faces” due to the stressful environment at their Houston ISD school. She opted to have them do virtual schooling this year.

As a parent, Yarborough wasn’t only troubled by how the superintendent’s test-centered plan changed school for the students she taught. Both of her children attended Pugh Elementary, part of the original cohort of NES schools, during the 2023-24 school year. She said her daughter’s fourth-grade class operated much like Yarborough was expected to run her sixth-grade class. Her son’s first-grade class wasn’t much different.

“My younger one would say, ‘Today's the same as every day,’” she recalls. “He said there wasn't the best part or the worst part. It wasn't good and it wasn't bad. It was just a flat line, like blah, every day.”

Yarborough found another school for her children — her son has specifically asked not to go back to Pugh Elementary for second grade. But to ensure she chose a school that’s beyond the reach of the New Education System, it meant looking at areas of the city that are wealthier.

Earlier this year, the district brought the total number of NES schools to 130 — nearly half of schools in the district — when it added 45 campuses to the NES roster.

“Miles is not going to target the schools where the parents have wealth and power, and that's concentrated in the schools with higher white populations,” Yarborough says. “And that's due to a legacy of racism.”

She feels bad about searching for schools based on the income level of their students’ families. But she doesn’t feel like she has a choice.

“Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, ‘Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged. My kids need a better social environment. My kids,’” Yarborough said. “They're giving our kids less. They're treating our kids differently. It's segregation.”

Effective Tech Integration Strategies: From District to Classroom

Abbie Misha — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

Integrating technology into the classroom involves more than just adding gadgets and software; it’s about creating a dynamic learning environment where students are actively engaged and teachers can teach more effectively. This journey requires collaboration among technology teams, instructional coaches and educators.

Recently, EdSurge spoke with three educational leaders from Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53 in Illinois about their experiences with and strategies for using technology to enrich classroom environments. Caitlin Smith, the director of technology, has been in the K-12 educational technology space for 10 years. As the technology integration and support specialist, Kari Moulton brings 18 years of education experience to her work with teachers and staff to support technology integration. Amber Skeate, starting her 20th year in the classroom, serves on the technology committee and as technology leader at Alan B. Shepard Elementary School.

Caitlin Smith
Director of Technology, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois

A District Perspective: Evaluating and Implementing New Technology

Technology plays a crucial role in classroom success, but integrating new tools can be challenging. Smith emphasizes the importance of addressing the big picture. "Being at the district level, I have to look at the challenges that hinder more than just one user," she explains. "I start by looking at where we have had the most issues coming from the end users (staff and students) or if the administration notices gaps in student growth." Smith’s approach ensures that the technology chosen benefits the entire district.

When evaluating new technology, Smith places a priority on solutions that are both easy to implement and cost-effective. "We discuss this in our technology leadership meetings and set up trials for each tech leader to test the technology," she says. This thorough vetting process ensures that the selected tools will effectively address the district’s needs. "Having both a technology integration specialist and a technology leadership committee allows the district to implement new technology throughout the year with the input of teachers along with my own staff’s recommendations," Smith adds, highlighting the importance of collaborative decision-making in tech integration.

Kari Moulton
Technology Integration and Support Specialist, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois

A School Perspective: Rolling Out Technology to Teachers

Once new technology is selected, rolling it out successfully is the next challenge. Moulton plays a key role in this phase. "We do whatever it takes to support our teachers," Moulton shares. Her team provides a monthly newsletter with information about new tools, creates instructional videos and offers one-on-one training sessions. Her proactive support helps teachers feel confident and prepared to use new technology in their classrooms. Additionally, Moulton meets with new teachers at the start of the school year to give them an overview of the technology they will be using, ensuring that they are ready to integrate it into their teaching from day one.

“Having a supportive edtech company ensures that the adoption of the new tools is smooth,” Moulton adds, underscoring the importance of reliable vendor support in the tech adoption process. She points to Bourbonnais' implementation of Vivi, the classroom engagement and campus communications solution as an example. “Vivi made [our technology] rollout unique because they sent us two boxes to demo for eight weeks. This allowed us to have various teachers at all grade levels test out the solution and give us feedback.”

“One beneficial way that edtech companies have supported the tools that we have adopted is great communication and support,” shares Moulton. She highlights Vivi's exemplary support: “I have monthly meetings with my [customer success manager] to check in on how things are going, what is working and what we might need to troubleshoot. They also give out [usage] data. With budgets affecting a majority of schools, having the data to back up the usage of the tool is very important and beneficial in determining the future use of the tool.”

Amber Skeate
Classroom Teacher, Bourbonnais Elementary School District 53, Illinois

A Classroom Perspective: Transforming Classroom Experiences

In the classroom, technology can transform instruction and student engagement. "Technology is a huge part of my classroom atmosphere,” says Skeate. The students each have a laptop and can use approved apps for independent work during math and reading, allowing them to work at their instructional level while Skeate meets with small groups. Technology is also used to present concepts to the class. "The way I project my slide presentations, lessons and videos wouldn't happen without Vivi,” shares Skeate.

The ability to actively participate in lessons through technology fosters a more engaging and interactive classroom environment. “The students ask me every day if they are going to use the Vivi App so that they can be the teacher for the lesson,” Skeate excitedly states. Vivi's wireless screen mirroring allows the teacher to pass control of the classroom display to the students to share how they answer problems or write a word.

And engagement is not the only benefit. “Technology has been a lifesaver when it comes to honing in on instructional levels of all students through particular reading and math apps,” explains Skeate. In addition, technology can be a time-saver for teachers. "Vivi's Play Content feature allows me to line up all the videos I need for the day,” notes Skeate, which saves her time she would otherwise spend searching for materials. This efficiency enables her to focus more on teaching and less on administrative tasks, ultimately benefiting her students.

Recommended Resources:

Tech Tips for Teachers: Find quick tech tips to enhance classroom engagement and efficiency.
Customer Stories: See how school districts are using Vivi to enhance learning and reach their goals.
Teacher Self-Care Checklist: Discover practical self-care tips to help teachers reduce stress and avoid burnout.
Replacing Outdated Screen-Sharing Tech: Learn what to do when your screen-sharing technology reaches the end of its life.

Collaboration Is Key

The collaboration between district leaders, tech coaches and teachers at Bourbonnais showcases how technology can be seamlessly integrated to create engaging and efficient classroom environments. By focusing on comprehensive training and ongoing support while implementing interactive tools like Vivi, these educators are transforming their teaching and enhancing student learning experiences. The positive impact of technology on the instructional experience and classroom dynamics is evident, demonstrating that when implemented thoughtfully, technology can be a powerful tool in education.

Strategies for collaborative technology integration

For district-level staff: Carry out a proactive needs assessment / Carry out multi-level evaluations

For school-level staff: Provide multifaceted teacher support / Provide training geared toward new teachers / Seek edtech partner collaboration

For classroom-level staff: Provide tech-infused instruction / Offer student choice and control

See for yourself how Vivi transforms communication, boosts classroom engagement and simplifies IT management. Learn more at Vivi.io.

When Students Don’t Feel Confident About Math, a Growth Mindset Matters

Gene Fashaw — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 01:00:00 -0700

Our relationship with math learning is severely damaged in this country. In 2022, only 26 percent of all eighth grade students scored proficient or above in mathematics. Even more concerning is that only 9 percent of Black eighth-graders are at a proficient level, or above.

As a Black male educator in northeast Denver, I have seen firsthand the results of poor engagement and learning in math classrooms. The lack of access to high-quality math instruction can impact students’ confidence and ability to learn math concepts and perpetuate deficit mindset thinking, especially within the Black community.

One day, out of curiosity, I asked my Facebook community about their math learning experiences, and many expressed negative feelings. Some folks commented:

“I have dyscalculia…When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher yelled at me and said, 'How do you not understand this yet?!' She then proceeded to call me dumb in front of the whole class and I just cried because I felt defeated.”

“Excelling in one area and struggling in the other made me feel like something was wrong with me.”

“I came to my geometry teacher at lunch for help and he told me that I was just wasting his time. He said I couldn’t do it.”

These experiences and perceptions are not isolated incidents; in fact, the majority of these responses are from Black people in my community, some of which I grew up with — and now, I teach their children.

This is unacceptable, to say the least, and it is the fault of schools and educators that math learning in the Black community is not prioritized. Providing our children, especially our most marginalized, with a strong math education can be empowering, and I’ve made it my mission to change students' mindsets from a deficit to an asset that can change their future.

It Starts in the Community

I grew up in northeast Denver — a place rich in Black history and culture where the Denver Public Schools (DPS) Board of Education enacted the Black Excellence Resolution. Although there is progress, it still has not made good on its promise when it comes to student learning.

Unfortunately, DPS follows a nationwide trend where Black students are overrepresented in discipline and underrepresented in academic achievement. I connect deeply with these inequities because I navigated that system as a child; now, as a teacher and a father, I can see the impact of these trends and how they impact Black students and their families.

Educators and the educational system often harbor implicit biases that result in lower expectations for Black students, particularly in mathematics. These biases manifest in various ways, such as underestimating Black students’ math abilities and providing less encouragement. This lack of belief in Black students’ potential can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where students internalize these low expectations and perform accordingly.

Whiteness in the disciplinary system also impacts Black students’ math learning by perpetuating racial biases and inequities. This results in lost instructional time and diminished opportunities for academic engagement in subjects like math where consistent practice is crucial.

There are ways to mitigate these challenges; notably, when parents positively engage with their children’s math education, it can buffer against the adverse effects of trauma, fostering resilience and academic success. Unfortunately, generational trauma among parents and families complicates this involvement.

Often, when I give my eighth grade students homework assignments, I receive many phone calls asking for help, or the work never gets done because the parents can’t help and don’t have the tools or resources to support them. Chalking it up to just not being math people, that trauma pushes parents to perpetuate negative, deficit-based thinking in themselves and their children.

Rather than letting students drown in a system that seeks to uphold harmful biases and stereotypes that have impacted their learning, I’ve sought to engage students in an asset-based approach that supports students and their families.

Establishing a Growth Mindset

Systems that fail to foster joy and belonging in our classrooms perpetuate biases that view students through stereotypical and negative lenses. Therefore, establishing positive norms and community agreements is essential to upholding a high standard of excellence for both our students and ourselves, and this lays the foundation for my students to thrive.

I once worked with a Black girl in my classroom who was fearless and assertive, yet vulnerable. She didn’t believe in her math ability, and it showed in her pursuit of perfectionism, which sometimes would prevent her from even engaging in the work. Despite facing significant personal challenges that often kept her out of school, she remained resilient. Recognizing her potential as a math scholar, I encouraged her to ask questions, embrace mistakes and find motivation in difficult tasks. She started to see mistakes not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow. This shift in mindset allowed her to tackle challenging problems with confidence and curiosity.

This summer, after she had just finished her freshman year in high school, I saw her at our annual Juneteenth celebration. She eagerly approached me, excited to share her successes and express her gratitude for helping her believe. Now, she is thriving and on a promising career pathway in behavioral health. Her journey is a testament to the power of support, resilience and belief in one’s potential.

Her classmate, on the other hand, was a different story. He was a charismatic and vociferous Black boy who had a strained relationship with math, and schooling in general. Learning grade-level content was a challenge for him. He struggled with work and lashed out when faced with difficult problems.

Although he qualified for additional support and accommodation services while in school, I questioned whether he was receiving the support he needed and deserved. I recognized these behaviors as cries for help rather than mere disruptions, and over time, I became his trusted adult, mentor and teacher.

During class, I scheduled time to sit with him one-on-one; this was when his math thinking was at its best, and he could engage in the most difficult tasks like transformations in the coordinate plane, operations with scientific notation and understanding linear relationships.

I also regularly checked in with him throughout the school day: in the hallway, during lunch, during practice, whenever I could. I worked hard to help him overcome years of ingrained habits, and we made a lot of progress. Ultimately, he moved to another school in the middle of the year, but I’m at least hopeful he felt supported enough to take what he learned to his next school community.

Experiences like these helped me understand that a difficult part of teaching is accepting that not every problem can be solved; nonetheless, the work is still essential, my presence is still valuable and giving students an opportunity to feel agentic about their math learning is key to overcoming preconceived notions about what we think students are capable of.

Math Literacy as a Tool for Liberation

As we look to the future, let us remember that math is more than teaching numbers — it's about nurturing a growth mindset, encouraging collaboration and inspiring innovation. It's about equipping students with the skills to navigate and shape an ever-changing world. In the heart of northeast Denver, amidst challenges and triumphs, I stand committed to this cause.

Teaching is my passion, and I’ve dedicated myself to creating a classroom environment that emphasizes relationships, joy and a sense of belonging as integral components of high-quality math learning. I prioritize the person behind the student. I show up the same way every single day. I want my students to know it’s okay to be themselves, to know they are loved and not to apologize for being who they are.

I believe it is important to illuminate the realities our students face in and out of the classroom — realities that include poverty, chronic absenteeism, and violence. To combat these realities, we must find ways to make math a tool for liberation by removing every possible barrier to success.

There is no better time to inspire my fellow educators to join forces with our communities and rebuild systems to uplift our children. As Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project, once stated, “Math literacy will be a liberation tool for people trying to get out of poverty and the best hope for people trying not to get left behind.”

This essay is a call to action, a reflection of my journey and an invitation to all who believe in the transformative power of math education. Let us forge a path where mathematical thinking is celebrated, where every student can say with conviction, "I can, and I will."

How a Returning College Student Advocated to Improve a Fledgling Online Program

Jeffrey R. Young — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:31:11 -0700

Paul Carr was just one semester shy of finishing his degree at Morehouse College when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant. So he decided to stop out, to get a job to support his budding family. He told himself he’d go back soon to finish.

That was more than 25 years ago.

Carr always intended to return. In fact, he made a promise to his father on his deathbed that he would finish his college degree.

So when he saw an announcement that Morehouse was starting an online program designed to help older students with some college credit finish their degrees, it seemed the perfect fit. He applied and joined the program’s first class of students in 2021.

Carr was one of the students we followed in a podcast series two years ago called Second Acts, which looked in depth at the challenges returning adult college students face in finishing their degrees.

As our series wrapped up, Carr still hadn’t finished that degree. Even after taking courses for a year in the online program, he wasn’t sure when Morehouse would be satisfied that he had taken enough additional credits to give him a degree — or if he would ever finish. He was, he said, in “limbo.”

And it turns out he wasn’t alone in hitting roadblocks in the new program.

As he described in our final episode, he had become a student leader in an effort to raise student concerns with administrators after he heard many classmates with similar struggles navigating the program.

An investigative story in USA Today last year detailed more of the “pitfalls” students in the program have faced.

“There were not enough slots for students to take the classes that they needed so they were sent off to take classes at other colleges online,” says one of the USA Today reporters, Chris Quintana. “They wanted a sense of when things would be done. When would these classes be available? And it was especially frustrating to these students because it’s a degree-completion program.”

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we checked in with Carr to hear what happened next.

Carr made clear that he and other students were reluctant to talk with reporters about their complaints because they feared any resulting article would be a “hit piece” that would make Morehouse look bad.

“And we weren't going to allow that,” Carr says. “Because while there were some issues, Morehouse is a really, really important institution. It is a beautiful institution. It is imperfectly perfect.”

Morehouse is the only all-male HBCU, and its alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. “And the Black community historically, it's had to always do more with less,” Carr says. “And so always Black people say, ‘OK, nobody's going to help us. We'll have to fix it.’”

But he and a few other students decided to participate in the USA Today story after they learned that the piece was moving forward with or without them. “So we made it a point to give our honest experiences, but also make sure that it’s clear we're here to protect our school,” he says.

Carr liked the way the article turned out, and he says it helped “light a fire” and spur the university to make improvements to Morehouse Online more rapidly. That happened not because of pressure from the media spotlight, he says, but because the article surfaced stories of challenges students were facing that he thinks administrators had not previously been aware of in detail.

It turns out that some of the challenges for the budding Morehouse Online stemmed from its arrangement with 2U, the online program manager that the college worked with to help it build the online degree program. The college originally announced plans to offer up to six majors within the first two years, including one in computer science. But now, more than three years after launch, it offers just one major, in business administration.

2U issued a blog post pushing back on some of the article’s reporting, though Quintana says he and the paper stand by their work and have issued no correction. When EdSurge invited Morehouse to comment for this story, Kendrick Brown, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, said that the institution remains “dedicated to expanding” the online program.

"With an enrollment of 245 students and 42 graduates over the past two years, the program continues to offer exceptional value to the men who seek to become part of the distinctive Morehouse experience,” he says.

Carr says he was on the verge of giving up, and posted a note to an online discussion forum for students in the program saying as much. He soon got a call from a classmate he had never met who urged him to stick it out.

Listen to the episode to find out what happened next. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

To Be Ready for Kindergarten, Teachers and Researchers Say Social-Emotional Skills Are Key

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 01:23:00 -0700

Ready or not, across the country, a new crop of kindergarteners has entered the K-12 school system.

Their teachers will spend these early weeks determining where the 5- and 6-year-olds are developmentally, what academic, social and emotional skills they bring, and what support they need to set them up for a successful school year.

That job has become more difficult in recent years, according to numerous surveys, research studies and EdSurge interviews, as the last few classes of kindergarteners have shown up lacking some of the basic skills and competencies that educators and school leaders had previously come to expect. These include following instructions, sharing, listening and participating during lessons, using writing utensils and craft materials, and toilet training.

Many people, both within the field of education and among the general public, are quick to blame the pandemic for these challenges. Although today’s kindergarteners were infants when the pandemic started, fewer of them participated in early learning experiences, such as preschool, and most had limited social interactions during a critical developmental period. Yet the explanation is likely far more complicated; several people, in interviews, pointed to the ubiquity of smartphones and screen time as at least part of the shift.

As a new school year begins, EdSurge asked education leaders and child development experts about the skills that are most important for a child to have when they start school.

There are five core developmental domains, says Van-Kim Bui Lin, a senior research scientist focused on early childhood development at Child Trends, a national nonprofit research center focused on child well-being.

One is physical development, including gross motor skills, which allow kids to run, hop and skip, as well as fine motor skills, which help children hold a pencil or use scissors.

Another is cognitive development, such as reasoning and problem-solving. Then there’s language development, which includes the ability to comprehend and communicate verbally, and eventually read and write. Another is social-emotional development; this includes active listening, interacting with adults and peers, sharing and holding attention.

Finally, there is a child’s approach to learning, including what motivates them and how they learn best.

“A child needs that whole set of development to really be successful,” Lin explains.

Social-Emotional Skills Set Kids Up for Success

The most critical skills for starting kindergarten, many people say, are social-emotional. This is the area of development where many teachers report seeing the steepest decline.

Many students in the Phoenix-Talent School District in southern Oregon, which experienced a devastating wildfire in the fall of 2020, compounding the effects of the pandemic, have been showing up to kindergarten without the skills needed to follow directions, share toys and materials with their classmates, and stick to a schedule.

I’m not interested in getting them ready for one year of school. I’m interested in getting them a foundation for life.

— Rachel Robertson

It’s the “routines and procedures,” says Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for Phoenix-Talent, “that has been the biggest impediment we’ve seen since the pandemic and fire.”

Lambert has also noticed that children of all ages — not just kindergarteners, but especially kindergarteners — have shorter attention spans. “And we don’t expect a kindergartener to come in and sit through an hour lesson,” she adds.

Social-emotional skills, such as self-control and listening, allow children to show up to kindergarten ready to engage and learn. These skills are the bedrock.

Is a child able to sit and listen during story time? That’s a good barometer, says Susan Petersen, director of education at Lodi Unified School District in northern California. “That would be ideal,” she notes.

Can a child interact with other children appropriately, taking turns and including others? “Those basic social skills would be nice as well,” Petersen adds.

Emotion regulation and perseverance are also big, adds Lin of Child Trends. If a child is struggling to use scissors, do they have the ability to overcome their frustration and keep at it? Can they tolerate it when another child uses the toy they were playing with?

If a child can work well with others, share, recognize their emotions and control their impulses, “the rest will come,” says Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons, which runs more than 600 early care and education centers in the U.S.

Fine Motor Skills Are Slipping

Fine motor skills, which relate to moving small muscles in the hands and wrists that allow individuals to engage in many functional skills like cutting, using a glue stick, opening a lunch box and turning pages in a book, are important but seem to be lacking among kindergarteners.

Pencil grasp — the way a person holds a pencil or other writing tool — has been an issue, even among students older than kindergarten, says Lambert of the Phoenix-Talent School District.

“It’s been my mission, looking at every kid’s pencil grip,” she says.

If kids don’t have that motor skill down, Lambert adds, their hands get fatigued, their letter formation is off, and it’s hard for them to complete work.

Lisa Eckert, director of early learning at the Pequea Valley School District in southeastern Pennsylvania, has had parents share that their child is entering kindergarten knowing all of their letters and numbers. Yet, because they learned it on a device, like an iPad, “they can’t pick up a pencil and write anything. Or they don’t know how to use scissors and cut a piece of paper,” Eckert shares.

Academic Skills Are Nice to Have, but Not Necessary

ABCs and 1-2-3s may seem like a baseline for kindergarten readiness. Yet educator after educator notes that they’re really just nice-to-haves.

“It’d be amazing if they could come in writing their name, recognizing letters and sounds of the alphabet,” says Lambert. “We don’t always expect that. But being able to come in, interact, understand their emotions, regulate, participate in a class and group — that helps us.”

Letters and numbers, reading and writing, those are the skills that kindergarten is designed to teach a child. It’s much more preferable that a child have some basic social-emotional skills than be able to read on the first day of kindergarten.

“I’m not interested in getting them ready for one year of school,” explains Robertson of Bright Horizons. “I’m interested in getting them a foundation for life.”

Toilet Training Is on the Decline

In the Education Week State of Teaching survey, which asked preK-3 teachers about how certain tasks and skills had changed from five years ago, 44 percent said that “potty training/using the bathroom without assistance” was “much more challenging” or “more challenging” today.

School district leaders confirmed this experience. Increasingly, they’re seeing students start kindergarten without the ability to use the bathroom on their own.

Kindergarten teachers simply don’t have the time to help each child in the bathroom, Lin of Child Trends notes.

“It makes a big difference in the day,” adds Eckert of Pequea Valley School District. “If [teachers] are focusing on helping kids in the bathroom, they're losing an hour in the day.”

Don’t Underestimate Showing Up

As U.S. public schools face alarmingly high rates of chronic absenteeism — defined as a student missing 10 percent or more days in a school year — it’s worth noting that showing up is essential for a child’s success in kindergarten.

“Students don’t learn if they’re not at school,” Lambert says. “Families think, ‘It’s just kindergarten. It’s OK if they miss a day.’ But kindergarten is so important. … Even missing a day is critical.”

Why Educator Wellness Matters

Abbie Misha — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:55:00 -0700

“When I present myself in front of students in a positive emotional state, I can increase student cognition, effort and long-term retention of information, Dr. Timothy Kanold excitedly shares. “The brain research on emotional intelligence as it relates to student learning is clear.”

Timothy Kanold
Co-Creator and Author, Wellness Solutions for Educators

As Kanold explains, teacher and administrator mental and emotional well-being is an essential component of student learning. Research indicates that educator wellness directly affects education quality, student achievement and school climate. With alarming teacher burnout and attrition rates, making educator wellness a priority is critical for the sustainability and success of our education system.

Recently, EdSurge spoke with Kanold and Dr. Tina Boogren, another leading expert in educator wellness. Kanold, an award-winning educator, author and national thought leader in mathematics and professional learning communities (PLCs), has co-authored numerous best-selling books and conducted professional development seminars worldwide. Boogren, an award-winning educator and best-selling author, has been recognized on the Top 30 Global Gurus in Education and featured in the Wall Street Journal as a Who’s Who of Distinguished Leaders.

During the pandemic, Kanold and Boogren combined their expertise to develop Solution Tree’s Wellness Solutions for Educators, a comprehensive approach to supporting the physical, mental, emotional and social well-being of educators. Their collaboration has resulted in practical strategies and actionable steps designed to help educators avoid burnout and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

EdSurge: What is educator wellness?

Tina Boogren
Co-Creator and Author, Wellness Solutions for Educators

Dr. Tim Kanold: We define educator wellness as a continuous process. It isn’t an event; it is something we work at forever. It’s an active process toward achieving a positive state of good health and enhanced physical, mental, emotional and social well-being — four dimensions.

Dr. Tina Boogren: When we think about the four dimensions, we imagine them as a circular shape to represent that continuous process. If we had to pick a place to start, we would recommend starting with physical wellness because when we feel better, we act better. We just approach all the other dimensions from a better place when our physical wellness is solid. Consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Level one is physiological needs, which includes the physical routines of food, movement and sleep. We're not advocating for a specific diet, and we want to move away from thinking about exercise as a way to “punish ourselves” for something we ate. Instead, we need to think: We deserve to eat lunch. We deserve to rest. And there is an important distinction between sleep and rest. We just need to treat ourselves like houseplants or puppies. Think about what houseplants or puppies need: love, water, movement, consistent food, sleep and sunshine.

I have this funny slogan I tell myself: Just drink the stupid water! Often, when I am not feeling well, I stop to consider that I haven’t had enough water. I think of drinking water as “low-hanging fruit.” It's such a small thing but yet it can have a huge impact on how we feel. Sometimes the smallest changes have the biggest impacts: drink the water, go for a walk around the block, put the phone in a different room when you go to bed at night.

As educators, we have the best jobs in the world because we contribute to our community. But to do that work well, these [self-care] routines need to be in place.

— Dr. Tim Kanold

Kanold: When we first started working on the physical wellness routines, I didn't quite understand the difference between sleep and rest with the same clarity that Tina did. Now, I think of sleep as avoiding physical exhaustion, while rest is more about avoiding daily psychological exhaustion. Our three physical wellness routines of food, movement and sleep directly impact the dimension of mental wellness.

Originally, we struggled with how to encourage discussion about mental wellness because people just didn’t talk about it. It was treated almost like mental illness. And then, the World Health Organization came out with a definition of mental wellness: “a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.” The definition helped us to build our three routines around mental wellness: decision, balance and self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is our confidence and competence in meeting the expectations of our daily work life. As educators, we have the best jobs in the world because we contribute to our community. But to do that work well, these [self-care] routines need to be in place.

Boogren: In the third dimension, emotional wellness, the routines build on each other: awareness, understanding and mindfulness. We need an awareness of our emotions, an understanding of where those emotions come from and the mindfulness to respond rather than react.

It’s really about taking that first step, no matter how small. That small first step ends up being big because it gets the momentum going to keep working on wellness across other dimensions.

— Dr. Tina Boogren

Kanold: The fourth dimension of the wellness framework is social wellness. Developing our social skills is key to collaboration and communication with colleagues, parents and students. Our profession is all about being great at relationships through active listening. However, social wellness is more than that; it also involves our purpose.

To be fully committed to successful relationships necessary in the workplace and not get lost in the daily grind, it helps to remember, Oh, that's right, that's why I'm here! I can see myself contributing to a collaborative purpose bigger than I am. When you can do that, when you exist in a workplace that connects you to your greater purpose, then everyone thrives. When you really lose your why and get caught up in the hardships and nuances of day-to-day work, burnout begins to set in.

The four dimensions of educator wellness.

What advice can you offer to teachers to initiate a wellness routine?

Kanold: Intentionality is a key factor. And it's a continuous daily effort. Some days require giving yourself grace, but you must remain intentional. For example, on Sundays, my wife and I sit down with our calendars and block time for our movement routines — for exercise. Then, we support each other to make sure it happens. When you aren’t intentional, you allow that routine to get hijacked. Being intentional sometimes means asking others for help, so that your wellness routines can be completed.

Boogren: Different strategies work for different people. But it’s really about taking that first step, no matter how small. Start with your physical wellness. Once you start feeling better physically, you can more easily move into the other dimensions. So that small first step ends up being big because it gets the momentum going to keep working on wellness across other dimensions.

Recommended Resources:

Wellness Solutions for Educators
Tim’s books
Request Tim’s availability through Solution Tree
Tina’s podcast
Tina's books
Request Tina’s availability through Solution Tree and Marzano Resources

What can school leaders do to support educator wellness in their buildings?

Kanold: One of the first things administrators can do is commit to the idea of a professional wellness plan for every teacher in their sphere of influence. They need to provide a forum for teachers to discuss what they need in order to achieve wellness. And they need to understand that this will not be a one-size-fits-all solution.

As a school leader, I need to ask questions: How can I help you with your wellness goals? What does that look like for you? What can I do to support you and provide structures that protect that time and opportunity for you?

Boogren: Sometimes we hear leaders suggest that they provide wellness support in the form of wearing jeans or having a coffee cart. That's great, but that is not wellness. That is a band-aid fix. Don't get me wrong, we love coffee carts and wearing jeans, but that's not the true wellness that we're proposing. Instead, we want leaders to consider how they can support staff (and themselves) in all four dimensions of educator wellness: physical, mental, emotional and social.

Leaders can start by asking what could structurally change, such as setting boundaries at school. What is the school-wide expectation around parents being able to get a hold of teachers? That was a boundary that was lost, perhaps rightfully so, during COVID. But if schools haven’t redefined those boundaries, it could destroy teachers. I hear stories about parents calling teachers at home on weekends. School leaders can help define stronger boundaries to protect teachers.

Kanold: It’s important to remember that administrators are still teachers. They are the lead teachers in their buildings. And they can teach wellness by first modeling their own wellness goals. By prioritizing wellness — by providing structures that protect teachers’ time away from the noise of work in their schools — administrators can create an improved culture in which teachers are more able to reach their wellness goals.

Should High School Students Do Academic Research?

Maggie Hicks — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 03:00:00 -0700

A growing number of high school students are looking for opportunities to do academic research, hoping to add ‘published author’ to their list of achievements when they apply to colleges.

Just look on popular Facebook groups and Reddit threads for tips on getting into selective colleges, and you’ll likely find posts recommending that students participate in intensive research or compete in science competitions as a way to stand out on college applications. It seems that many aspiring applicants and their parents have fixed on the idea that getting research published in an academic journal as a high school student has arisen as a new trophy to strive for in an escalating race to try to stand out as an applicant, especially after more selective colleges have dropped requiring the SAT or other admissions tests.

But experts say that the trend of high school research, while well-intentioned, has plenty of pitfalls. After all, academic research often requires deeper knowledge of a field than is typical in high school, and it involves carefully following ethical guidelines to protect research subjects from potential harm that students may not be aware of without expert guidance.

“A piece of research, even a basic piece of research, can take years to produce,” says Bob Malkin, the executive director at the International Research Institutes of North Carolina. “High school students have classes they need to worry about. They may be playing sports. They might be pursuing other hobbies or interests. So mixing this in with all the other things they need to do can definitely be a bad idea, just because it takes so much time.”

Pushing students to get involved in research early can also amplify inequities among those who don’t have access to expensive research programs or opportunities at elite institutions. That’s because many students can’t afford to participate in summer programs to hone research skills, or they aren’t taught important research skills in high school, says Bethany Usher, the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University. As a result, they don’t have the same experiences that will help them find a job in a lab or conduct their own project when they get to college freshman year, she says.

That’s not to say that teaching research skills in high school is bad, though. In fact, Malkin recently co-wrote a book about how to help young students along the path, called “A Guide to Academic Research for High School Students.”

The hope, experts say, is that teaching research skills becomes a more mainstream affair, making its way into high schools and undergraduate courses outside of elite private schools. That could help build basic skills without chasing publication at too young an age.

Building Skills

Bonnie Hale, an independent counselor advising high school students on their college applications, says that she sees students whose attempts to do research to enhance their resume does them more harm than good.

One student, for instance, asked Hale to help her send out a survey to parents across California, a task that would’ve required the oversight of an institutional review board.

Other students will try to submit their work for publication without the proper elements of an academic paper, such as a background literature review or a methods section. One student hoped to submit a paper that didn’t even include a research question, Hale says. No peer reviewed journal would publish this work, she adds.

"Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby."

— Bethany Usher, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University.

Some journals cater toward research from high schoolers, but they often require high fees, are run by other high school or undergraduate students or aren’t reputable journals, Hale says. Plus, publishing in these journals likely won’t impress college admissions officials, she adds. For students looking to get research published, Malkin suggests they work with a college faculty member, though that can be difficult to pull off.

Publishing research without proper mentorship or oversight can also have major consequences for the student, says Hale, who co-wrote the book on student research with Malkin. She’s worked with some students who say they participated in a study, only for Hale to find out they overstated their role in the paper. If students get caught conducting research unethically or mis-representing themselves on an application, a college could rescind its offer or put that student on probation, she says.

“That’s what students don’t understand,” Hale says. “That the pressure makes them go in a direction that they ought not to go.”

To Hale and Malkin, improving the environment starts with changing parent attitudes. Parents need to lower the pressure and understand that their child will learn and be happy in college even if they don’t get into their dream school, Malkin says. If they’re interested in research, encourage them, but if they’re not, don’t force it, he says. “Somehow somebody's got to convince these parents that your kid's going to be okay,” he adds.

Usher, of Radford, says more high schools around the country should also help teach research skills — without pushing too hard too soon. She says high school teachers could encourage their students to participate in community-based projects, for example, such as surveys or other outreach in their local area. Often the skills young students learn through doing research, like critical thinking, are what help them later on rather than the research itself, she says.

“If we want to reach a greater majority of students, being able to have those teachers well-equipped to be taking advantage of research opportunities from communities and making them relevant to students” is essential, Usher says.

Early exposure to core research skills could also help with college readiness and retention, she adds. “Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby,” she adds.

Some colleges have also begun incorporating research skills into courses. Throughout a student’s time in college, classes will continue to build on those skills, which students can use when they enter the workforce or graduate school, says Lindsay Currie, executive officer for the Council on Undergraduate Research.

Most graduate programs now require some level of research, Malkin says, and students need to start as early as possible. Working research into classes encourages students to sign up for additional opportunities outside of the classroom once they build their confidence in the subject, Currie adds.

“If you just have a flyer that says, ‘hey, do you want to participate in my lab,’ you might not, as a college freshman, really understand what that means if you don't have any context for it,” she says. These courses “make it so students understand the value and can test out whether it's the right fit for them.”

In one biology class at Radford, students conducted research on a specific fungus among bees. After a semester of trapping bees and testing them using various methods, the students presented their original findings at a research fair. These types of projects can be conducted in any type of course, says Usher, who was the previous president of the Council on Undergraduate Research. She suggests that students could each choreograph their own routines in a dance class rather than just all learning the same steps.

“They don't have to step out of their comfort zone, everybody's going to class so there's not a ‘you get selected for a thing’” type of process, Usher says. “Sometimes students do research and they don't even know they've done it,” she adds “You need to be like, ‘this thing that you thought was really cool and exciting, that was research.’”