Acceleration

If learning can be thought of as a continuum or an ongoing journey to improve, adapt, and grow, then so must instruction. After all, instructional improvement, or effective instruction, is largely an outcome of a teacher’s understanding and use of specific strategies, skills, and structures – each ranging in its use and effectiveness. It is…

Schools and school districts know the importance of communicating a shared vision of success for their students, staff, and community. This vision often focuses on the idea of preparing students for their future. But what happens to that future when students struggle, year after year, and fall continuously behind? How do we teach all students…

Why are some students reluctant to learn? Experienced teachers will tell you that there are many reasons why a student may be less than enthusiastic about learning, such as hunger, a lack of support at home, feeling emotionally distressed or worried, or a lack of self-confidence. In fact, this last reason can be one of…

Technology has often been seen as a catalyst that would revolutionize education. But whether that technology was papyrus and ink, slate and chalk, the Socratic Method, or a Chromebook, what has remained a constant, proven repeatedly by research, is that technology is only a means to an end and that in itself, does not lead…

In his book, Mind Rules, John Medina describes key principles on how the brain works. One of these principles is “Stressed brains do not learn the same way as non-stressed brains.” Emotional instability can lead to chronic stress and chronic stress affects concentration, language processing, problem-solving, and memory (Medina, 2008). More specifically, children who are…

There has been an ongoing discussion of COVID learning loss: how much learning did students forget from March of 2020 to the school’s return and how effective hybrid or complete remote learning has been since then. In a recent survey, teachers from eight different countries, including the US, reported “that students were on average two…

There are many challenges that face students whose native language is other than English and whose background experiences may have occurred in a different culture and geography. Early experiences may have been rich or chaotic, but regardless, both make up the life experiences of these students.  We know that students build new knowledge on previously…

A popular viewpoint among educators is that discipline must come before instruction. Because student disruptions create a ripple effect across a classroom, teachers often feel forced to immediately deal with every misbehavior, resulting in a significant loss of instructional time. Teachers report losing as much as 144 minutes of instructional time on average to classroom…