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School Leaders Now
If a school were a body, the teachers would be the hands, the administrators would be the feet moving it forward, and the school front office staff would undoubtedly be the head making it all work. Administrative assistants and school secretaries must assume many roles, as it's their job to help a school run smoothly. Having a front office that has an efficient system and positive culture has a tremendous impact on how a school operates.
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Harvard Business Review
The idea of "vacation" often conjures up thoughts of trips to faraway lands. While it's true that big trips can be fun and even refreshing, they can also take a lot of time, energy and money. A lot of people feel exhausted just thinking about planning a vacation — not just navigating personal commitments and school breaks, but deciding how to delegate major projects or put work on hold, just so they can have a stress-free holiday. Because of this, some might put off their time away, figuring they'll get to it when their schedule isn't so demanding, only to discover at the end of the year that they haven't used up their paid time off.
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Fast Company
Reading is one of the most fundamental skills, and reading for pleasure can transform your health, memory and productivity. In our age of information overload, however, it can feel like there isn't enough time in the day to get through all of your Slack messages, emails and project reports, not to mention all the articles you intend to read. The sheer amount of documents and other communication many of us need to read at work each day can seem like a daunting task — but there are ways to get through everything you need to read at work faster.
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School Leaders Now (commentary)
Amy Lynn Tompkins, a contributor for School Leaders Now, writes: "I have a seven-year-old second grade girl in my school who has autism. She is also smart and creative. She adds joy and intelligence to her class 70 percent of the time. However, at least twice a week, she also loses control — yelling at teachers and her peers, tearing charts off the walls and knocking chairs. When this happens, we've chosen to have the whole class leave the room until she calms down, rather than have a trained staff member contain her physically. It was a tough behavior management call. We were affecting the many instead of the one. But now, we're down to about a five- to 10-minute turnaround time to restoring calm."
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Japan Math’s K – 2 curriculum teaches math through problem solving.
Aim: Developing the will and skill to use math.
Methodology: Problem solving for deeper understanding
Program: Efficient and Effective Topic Arrangement
Click here for more information: japan-math.com
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Inc. (commentary)
Chris McGoff, a contributor for Inc., writes: "I've written before about the importance of corporate culture, how to define it, and how to enforce it to help your company reach peak performance. Culture is the line a group draws that separates the behaviors they stand for, advocate, and tolerate from the behaviors they will not tolerate. This line is always present and is being drawn and enforced at all times."
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Harvard Business Review
Feedback, as they say, is a gift. Research bears this out, suggesting that it's a key driver of performance and leadership effectiveness. Negative feedback in particular can be valuable because it allows us to monitor our performance and alerts us to important changes we need to make. And indeed, leaders who ask for critical feedback are seen as more effective by superiors, employees and peers, while those who seek primarily positive feedback are rated lower in effectiveness.
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Leadership Freak
You sincerely want to help, but what if you employ strategies and habits that cause harm. Sincerity doesn't erase incompetence. When time allows, step back and let people struggle with their own challenges and problems.
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NIGHTLOCK®
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School Leaders Now
The research continues to pour in: Classroom movement matters. The benefits of a healthy lifestyle are a natural, wonderful consequence. It's the school-related bonus, though, that should have principals and school leaders pumped. Study after study concludes that students who move more during the school day are able to focus better, stay on task longer and learn more. Sounds pretty great, right?
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HR DIVE
A lack of satisfaction around pay among younger generations means the issue of compensation won't be any less important in the talent acquisition space for the foreseeable future. In addition to raising wages, employers might want to consider other ways to attract skilled talent from this contingent, like career development opportunities and comprehensive benefit options to keep them on board and engaged for the long haul.
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Education Week
The Federal Commission on School Safety will have its first "field" hearing — and second meeting — at a school in Anne Arundel County, Md., that has embraced Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. And advocates are already questioning whether U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who chairs the panel, will come away with something new to share with the K-12 field.
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District Administration Magazine
Perhaps in an effort to right the wrongs of the past, the Department of Education has begun accepting applications for $2.3 million in grants that will teach Native American languages to a new generation of children. Starting in the 1870s, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs ran boarding schools for Native American children that separated them from their families and isolated them from their traditional languages and cultures so they could "assimilate" into American society. As a result, several generations of Native Americans did not learn their ancestral languages.
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CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP
U.S. society believes teachers are interchangeable because education is standardized. Countries who have consistently higher student scores prove great teachers are the driving force behind educational success. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without training. We must support teachers who help kids compete in the global marketplace.
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EdScoop
The push to close the homework gap — which affects students whose schools are internet-connected and digitally integrated but whose homes are not — got a legislative nudge, when two U.S. senators introduced a bill to expand the FCC's E-rate program to include school buses equipped with Wi-Fi.
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The Conversation
There are only a handful of astronauts, but every year thousands of high school and college students get to visit space vicariously, by launching their own satellites. Students design, build and test each one, and then work with space industry professionals to get them loaded on rockets and launched into orbit. But this opportunity — available to students and educators for more than 30 years — may not continue much longer, as the Federal Communications Commission considers hiking communications licensing fees beyond the reach of most students and schools.
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EdScoop
Edtech software providers do not meet basic standards for transparency and consistent privacy and security practices, according to a recent report from Common Sense, a nonprofit that promotes safe media habits. The report, which was based on a three-year analysis, found that just 10 percent of more than 100 of the most-used edtech applications and services met Common Sense's standards for transparency and quality. The nonprofit said it based its process on "existing federal and state law, as well as privacy and security universal principles."
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eSchool News
Schools are using digital content more than ever before. They are relying on digital resources, open educational resources, and teacher-created content to support curricular goals. As more of our content is pushed out to students through online platforms, our responsibility to consider copyright as part of our planning process, no matter what the process looks like, grows. When we are in the trenches of testing windows, grading, school safety, and all of our other daily responsibilities, copyright might not feel like the number-one priority. But it has to become a priority.
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eSchool News
Close to half of teachers (42 percent) in a Gallup poll say they think digital devices have a "mostly helpful" impact on students' education, but they have less positive views of devices' impact on physical and mental health. Thirty percent of teachers in the March 5-12 poll say digital devices are neither helpful nor harmful to students' education, and 28 percent say devices are mostly harmful. Fifty-five percent of surveyed teachers say digital devices have a "mostly harmful" effect on students' physical health, and a resounding 69 percent of teachers say students' digital device use has a mostly harmful impact on their mental health.
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MiddleWeb
There's some sort of invisible, undeniable connection between student success and classroom management. Make a short list of the teachers that you know who consistently get students — even the most challenging ones — excited about learning and caring about classwork.
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Edutopia (commentary)
As teachers, we often bemoan the fact that "students can't write anymore" and blame it on everything from texting and social media to the lack of grammar instruction and absence of vocabulary books. The truth is probably closer to the sentiment of David Labaree: "Learning to write is extraordinarily difficult, and teaching people how to write is just as hard."
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Education DIVE
John Drazan is hardly your typical math and science educator and researcher. As a former college basketball player and an engineer, Drazan is more likely to illustrate these subjects using a homemade $60 vertical jump plate to let students make slam dunks on their own, rather than using handouts and textbooks. "Science not communicated is science not done," Drazan told Education Dive in an interview. "I tell that to my students all the time."
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By: Bambi Majumdar (commentary)
 The education system that forms the backbone of our schools is more than 125 years old. What may have worked well in 1892 is no longer helping our students. In an era of Google, social media and continuous innovation, this should be a defunct system. Students need different skills and a different way to learn and absorb knowledge. Instead of rote memory and test output, children today need to learn new skills on a perpetual basis. Some change is on the way.
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The Hechinger Report
Kids arrive at school with large achievement gaps between rich and poor, and that achievement gaps grow over the summer. Now two new studies show that the summer learning gap between the lower and middle classes may be narrowing while the rich surge ahead of everyone. A May 22, 2018 report from the National Center for Education Statistics tracked more than 18,000 kids who attended kindergarten in 2010-2011 and followed up with their parents in the fall of 2011 to see how they spent their summer. It's a nationally representative group, expressly selected to mimic the actual racial, ethnic, income and geographic diversity in the country.
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The Brookings Institution
Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, describes the skills children need to succeed in life and how to improve the quality of learning for the most marginalized children and youth, including girls and children affected by extreme violence.
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The Washington Post
Do kids like school? The only way to know is to ask them, and that's the aim of surveys conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, a test known as "the nation's report card" because it is seen as the most consistent nationally representative measure of U.S. student achievement since the 1990s. The NAEP is administered every two years to groups of U.S. students in the fourth and eighth grades, and less frequently to high school students — with math and reading exams administered every two years and assessments in science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, technology and engineering literacy, and U.S. history less often.
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EdSurge
When No Child Left Behind passed back in 2002, Congress enthusiastically proclaimed that 100 percent of American students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. What they didn't expect was that some states would significantly lower the bar for proficiency to avoid being marked as failing or losing special funding from the federal government.
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Education Week
States adhering to the PARCC test's standards are setting higher expectations for students than those using SBAC or the ACT Aspire, a new federal study concludes. The study, released Thursday by the statistical wing of the U.S. Department of Education, maps states' cut scores — the point at which a student is deemed proficient — onto the testing scale used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This allows for comparisons of the tests' technical difficulty, despite variations in each test's emphasis and format.
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Star Tribune
After-school and summer programs for kids and teens across Minnesota are closing or paring back their offerings, leaving thousands of kids without somewhere to go when they aren't in the classroom. The decline comes after years of dwindling funds for such programs from federal, state and philanthropic sources. No one tracks the entire pool of money for the programs, but in Minneapolis alone, four of the largest contributors — the state and federal government, the McKnight Foundation and the Twin Cities United Way — have dropped their funding from $37 million in 2009 to $17.7 million in 2017, according to the Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board, a collaboration of the city, school district, Park Board and Hennepin County.
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NAESP
In the wake of the Stoneman Douglass High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 students and teachers dead, many members of our school communities realize that they could be next. Many teachers are, rightly, motivated to be a part of the national debate about school safety and gun control. Consequently, they are voicing their views regarding controversial policy proposals, such as arming teachers.
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NAESP
When Ryan Daniel became principal of Chillum Elementary School in 2017, she knew the school was located in a subsidized housing complex and that English was a second language for most of its students. She was also aware that the person she was replacing at the 360-student school in Hyattsville, Maryland, had been in the role for 19 years.
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