By Dr. Jason Trumble Yesterday I was facilitating a class activity for my college students who want to be teachers. We were digging into how to design formative assessments that could be used to check for student progress throughout a unit. I loved this time. Although we were all masked, the room was a buzz of ideas and searches and collaborations and questions. Behind my mask, I was grinning from ear to ear as I moved from one table to another to support students' wonderings and help connect assessment to teaching. That came to a quick stop. As I glided across the front of the room a student ..read more

By Mara Aspinall, Jessica Little, and Leah Perkinson As schools work to remain open this fall, school administrators are working to adjust to a new reality of trying to keep children safe in school in the face of a highly contagious COVID-19 Delta variant. Until the Delta variant, children seemed to be less likely to contract and transmit COVID-19, but Delta has changed that. When school ended in the spring, many districts were dropping mitigation measures with the expectation that the fall would be a return to “normal” pre-pandemic in person learning. Sadly, this is not the case. The first l ..read more

By The Rockefeller Foundation A national survey of more than 3,100 parents, conducted in July by RAND Corporation and commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation, finds that nine out of ten parents plan to send their child to school in person this fall—up from 84 percent in May 2021, even amid the surge of the Delta variant. The survey reveals that while the vast majority of parents are sending their children back to school this fall, they do not feel informed on schools’ Covid-19 safety measures. One in three parents say they don’t know their school’s safety plans, and six in ten parents say ..read more

By Abby Quillen Environmental & Personal Wellness Expert This article is a cross-post from our colleagues at Quill.com whose education resource center blog offers a number of resources for teachers, parents, and educators of all types. There's no getting around it: School supplies are expensive. And because of school budget cuts, a larger portion of the cost of outfitting classrooms falls on parents and teachers. However, some communities are devising innovative solutions from teaming up with charities to holding donation drives and launching crowdfunding campaigns, to make sure students h ..read more

By Rachel Fuhrman With the bizarre 2020-2021 school year behind us and as we prepare for our own summer respite here at Tales from the Classroom, we are excited and hopeful as we look to the future! We know that many parents have been concerned about the impact this year has had on their children. While there may have been many challenges, the most important thing is that our children feel safe and supported during uncertain times. As we move into a space where safety is readily available for all, we are ready to once again focus on educational content. To help parents bridge the gap between t ..read more

By Estelle Willie and Jessica Little Congressional passage of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act is an important step toward safely reopening K-12 schools. The legislation provides $130 billion for implementing public health protocols, including funding for improved ventilation, socially-distanced classrooms, PPE and additional staff support that would enable the reopening of K-12 schools. The President has announced a goal of getting at least a portion of the nation’s K-12 students back in school within his first 100 days in office. There is no time to waste in meeting these ..read more

By Jessica Terlick Jessica Terlick is a presenter, life education coach, podcaster, and head of the Lead and Inspire community who has been in education for over a decade. Through her work with Lead and Inspire, workshops, speaking events, and podcast Mums Who Want More, she provides wellness support for women around the world. This story is a cross-post from her blog. As teachers, we’ve all fielded the slightly aggressive comments about our “holidays” and a general feeling from others that we shouldn’t complain as we finish work at 3pm. Yeah right. Did you just fall off your chair laughing ..read more

By Larisa Gray, Jeremy Harrison, & Nate Miller Pedagogical Musings: Pedagogy Nerd Out is a multi-part series that features three teachers who have taken control of their own professional development with an aim to offer a new vision for teacher collaboration, empowerment, meaning making, and student success. This series gets you inside a teacher-created learning space that strives to encourage creativity, foster innovation, and inspire teachers to be their absolute best. We were sitting in a Google Meet Professional Development, listening to all the teachers in our school introduce themsel ..read more

By Brandi Bellacicco In light of the racial and social unrest in the last year, many educators are seeking better ways to serve all students. As I grow my own practice, I spend a lot of time reflecting on exactly how I serve my students. Being a culturally responsive educator is not easy, but it is essential. It takes time to unpack personal biases and challenge the norm. For white educators in particular, it may even feel like an abstract task - how exactly do we dismantle and challenge unconscious biases in ourselves and our schools? What is appropriate in the early childhood classroom? How ..read more

By L.A. Cowden Recent events in race relationships, such as the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, and countless more, and the publication by Ibram X Kendi’s (2019) best-selling book—How To Be an Antiracist— have renewed an interest and curiosity in antiracism. Kendi (2019) argues people either act in racist or antiracist ways, and, because racism is so prevalent in society, a person cannot remain neutral in this binary choice. In fact, claiming to be “not racist” does not make you antiracist; rather, unless a person is actively working to ensure that their ..read more