Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla. “I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth. “I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle. At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year. It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that r ..read more

Excerpted from Humans Who Teach by Shamari Reid. Copyright © 2024 by Shamari Reid. Published by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. All rights reserved. I will share with you what I do when I am confronted with the decision to make big moves in my life that honor my commitments to myself and working toward the world we all deserve. This is how I start. Step 1: In a sacred place — such as a journal or a personal voicenote — articulate in your own words what you are afraid to start doing. For example, when I made the decision to share with my parents how I ..read more

Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy. One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called outcomes-based con ..read more

Excerpted from What Teachers Need to Know About Memory by Jonathan Firth and Nasima Riazat. Copyright (c) 2024 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Some of the most effective learning strategies are those known as desirable difficulties. These make learning more effortful but are useful (desirable) because they make forgetting less likely, and help to ensure that what is practiced is both retained and can be used flexibly in the future. However, could it be the case that for some learners, there are already enough difficulties in the classroom, without adding more? After all, the le ..read more

It seemed like it should be an easy win for Des Moines Superintendent Ian Roberts to dust off his racing shoes and compete against a team of elementary schoolers. The 47-year-old Guyanese runner’s skills had taken him around the globe, after all, even competing in the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. “I showed up to the school, and I’m waiting there. And I saw the principal and teachers and they brought the entire school out to the track. And I’m thinking, ‘oh,'” Roberts recalled with a laugh. What was initially going to be a race between Roberts and Everett Clark, a lucky second-grader wh ..read more

Sophomore Neomi sits quietly in an office at her high school in a Colorado mountain town west of Denver. It’s a cold December morning and she’s wearing gold and black Nikes and a gray hoodie, pulled up. She’s surrounded by school staff and her mom. “I just wanna be really clear about the intention of this meeting. It’s not to make you feel bad,” says Dave, a school administrator. “What’s going on?” he asks Neomi. “Why aren’t we coming to school? Because you were coming to school quite a bit, and then all of a sudden…” As Neomi listens, tears roll down her cheeks. “Do you not feel safe? Are you ..read more

On a recent school day in Del Norte County, Calif., in one of the state’s northernmost school districts, 17-year-old Emma Lenover sits at home on the couch. In some ways, Emma is a typical teen. She loves Disneyland and dance class. But she has already faced more adversity than some classmates will in a lifetime. “All of October and all of November, there was no school because there was no aide,” says Emma’s mother, Melony Lenover, leaning her elbows into the kitchen table. Emma has multiple health conditions, including cerebral palsy. She uses a wheelchair, a feeding tube and is nonverbal. To ..read more

Every year, K-12 schools across the country welcome hundreds of thousands of newcomers – foreign-born students who have migrated, are seeking asylum, are refugees, are undocumented or are unaccompanied – into their classrooms. Among the multitude of challenges that these students face is entering a completely new education system, often in a language that is unfamiliar. But the strain is also felt by teachers both in general education and English language acquisition classrooms.  Newcomer students in today’s global context present “nuances that make it particularly important for the educa ..read more

If you’re a parent struggling to get your kids’ off their devices and outdoors to play, here’s another reason to keep trying: Spending at least two hours outside each day is one of the most important things your kids can do to protect their eyesight. “We think that outdoor time is the best form of prevention for nearsightedness,” says Dr. Noha Ekdawi, a pediatric ophthalmologist in Wheaton, Ill. And that’s important, because the number of kids with nearsightedness – or myopia – has been growing rapidly in the U.S., and in many other parts of the world. In the U.S., 42% of people are now myopic ..read more

Last week, I wrote about trends in school segregation in the 70 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. That data showed considerable progress in integrating schools but also some steps backward, especially since the 1990s in the nation’s biggest cities. We should care about this troubling shift because many researchers say that children learn best in integrated classrooms. That’s why I also wanted to trace the data on academic achievement over the same time period. Unfortunately, we don’t have ..read more