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3 different ways to go 1:1
Scholastic Administrator Magazine
As most districts know, simply outfitting kids with the latest devices as part of a 1:1 push won't boost achievement. Unless you find the right tool to help students excel at learning, you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-tech pencils. Three district administrators told us how they made their decisions — and what you need to know to make yours.
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Back-to-school stress: How to recognize it and help kids manage it
The Washington Post
Yes, kids get super-stressed, too, but it isn't always easy to tell what is bothering them because they hide symptoms or explain them in vague ways. As the 2014-2015 school year gears up, it's a good time to learn how to identify stress in children and teens and help them manage it.
Teaching dollars and cents: Should 'financial literacy' be part of school curricula?
TakePart
With topics such as STEM, Common Core, and standardized test scores dominating the news in the education world, Dr. Allen Cox believes another issue is far more urgent: how many students can read a credit score or balance a checkbook. If Cox had his way, kindergartners nationwide would learn about lending and interest rates, middle schoolers would get lessons on keeping a household budget, and high schoolers wouldn't graduate without a tutorial on college loans and preserving personal wealth.
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Students: We need coding skills
eSchool News
A new report reveals that 59 percent of students who do not know how to code would like to learn, while just 23 percent of students actually know how to code. The survey from StudyMode.com surveyed 1,000 StudyMode.com student members, ranging from K-12 to graduate school, to learn more about students' computer programming skills. Sixty-one percent of students said they believe coding skills will give them a competitive advantage in the job hunt.
A picture of language: The fading art of diagramming sentences
NPR
When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a little zany. But the practice has a long — and controversial — history in U.S. schools. And while it was once commonplace, many people today don't even know what it is.
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Auditory awareness: Are students hearing the lesson?
Edutopia (commentary)
Ben Johnson, an administrator, author and educator, writes: "How many choir performances, or especially school plays have you attended where you could not hear the performers clearly? No matter how well they performed, I benefitted little from the experience if the sound system was poor. Nothing is more frustrating than attending your own child's performance and not being able to hear them."
4 skills to teach students in the first 5 days of school
MindShift
The first few days of school are a vital time to set the right tone for the rest of the year. Many teachers focus on important things like getting to know their students, building relationships and making sure students know what the classroom procedures will be. While those things are important, Alan November, a former teacher-turned-author and lecturer says the most important ideas to hammer home will help students learn on their own for the rest of the year.
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Common Core is becoming even more unpopular
The Atlantic
The Common Core State Standards initiative, arguably the most sweeping change to public education in at least a generation, is facing mounting skepticism — and still drawing many blanks. A pair of national polls out this week asked similar questions of voters about key education issues including the Common Core, which once had widespread bipartisan support but is now under attack. Both polls — one by Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup and one by Harvard researchers for Education Next — found public support eroding for the common standards, which set grade-level expectations for student learning but do not dictate classroom instruction.
Missed last week's issue? See which articles your colleagues read most.
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Want an easy way to add technology to hands-on STEM lessons? Ward’s Single Probes is the solution. The only modular probeware designed for elementary and middle school users, Ward’s Single Probes makes probeware easy, flexible and affordable, with nine interchangeable probes, universal connectivity to any device, and optional Wi-Fi. Learn More at wardsci.com/singleprobes
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What are you doing to prevent bullying?
District Administration Magazine
This is the disturbing opening from a Los Angeles Times article published a year ago: "Two students from separate schools committed suicide within days of each other this month — which is National Bullying Prevention Month — and both boys apparently had been bullied. Now, parents are asking questions not just about bullying but also about anti-bullying videos, which both schools aired shortly before the incidents." In one of these situations, the student walked out of the video screening expressing suicidal thoughts to another student. The following morning, he took his life. His father has filed a wrongful death suit in federal court against the school district and the producers of the anti-bullying video.
How does the brain learn best? Smart studying strategies
MindShift
In his new book, "How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens," author Benedict Carey informs us that "most of our instincts about learning are misplaced, incomplete, or flat wrong" and "rooted more in superstition than in science." That's a disconcerting message, and hard to believe at first. But it's also unexpectedly liberating, because Carey further explains that many things we think of as detractors from learning — like forgetting, distractions, interruptions or sleeping rather than hitting the books — aren't necessarily bad after all. They can actually work in your favor, according to a body of research that offers surprising insights and simple, doable strategies for learning more effectively.
15 apps every principal should have
THE Journal
There may be hundreds of thousands of apps in the various app stores, but only a minuscule percentage of those are actually useful, and an even smaller percentage are relevant to the job duties of the mobile-minded principal. To help separate the wheat from the chaff, THE Journal asked five tech-savvy principals in five different states to reveal their favorite work-related apps. Candy Crush doesn't count, even if it does relieve stress after a tough day.
Classroom Cribs Challenge asks teachers to rethink learning spaces
EdTech Magazine
Could your classroom use a tech-focused makeover? Today's classrooms are evolving to meet the demands of the new learning paradigms, and some teachers are getting in on the ground floor of this transformation with some creative redesign concepts. More than 2,000 teachers have signed up to participate in the Classroom Cribs Challenge, which kicked off this month, according to the event's organizers. The challenge urges teachers to rethink how their learning spaces are designed.
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ADHD children make poor decisions due to less differentiated learning processes
Science Daily
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most common psychiatric disorders among school children. Pupils with ADHD often make poorer decisions than their unaffected classmates. Researchers have now discovered that different learning and decision-making mechanisms are responsible for these behaviors, and localized the underlying impairments in the brain.
Better oversight needed of federal program for homeless students, GAO says
Education Week
The U.S. Department of Education needs to provide better oversight of a federal program aimed at ensuring that homeless students have access to the public education system, a new Government Accountability Office report found. The authors of the report, obtained by Education Week, listed several challenges to the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program, which provides students with transportation to and from school as well as wraparound services such as health care, counseling and food assistance.
States escaping No Child Left Behind can get more time on teacher evaluations
The Huffington Post
For years, the Obama administration has made tougher teacher evaluations a centerpiece of its education agenda, giving states incentives to grade educators partially in accordance with students' standardized test scores. But, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced most states will get a reprieve of sorts. Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, wrote in a Thursday letter to state school chiefs that states that have received waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act will be able to continue to evade the law even if they did not use test scores in this year's teacher evaluations. But states are still required to show the test scores to teachers.
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15 apps every principal should have
THE Journal
There may be hundreds of thousands of apps in the various app stores, but only a minuscule percentage of those are actually useful, and an even smaller percentage are relevant to the job duties of the mobile-minded principal.
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Maximizing PLC time to flip your class
District Administration Magazine
Recently, we have been talking with a number of people about how to best implement flipped learning, and one hurdle mentioned over and over by teachers is that they do not have enough time.
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5 apps for today's administrators
eSchool News
Leading a school or a school district is, understandably, an important and critical job. Today's school administrators must keep up to date with learning trends, instructional strategies, technology initiatives, and everything in between.
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With school closed, teachers and volunteers in Ferguson work to fill gap
The New York Times
The teachers stood on a street corner near Griffith Elementary School here on Thursday, jumping and dancing as they tried to get drivers' attention. No, the school was still not open for classes. But children could at least pick up free lunches there. Parents parked their cars and children leapt up the steps toward a table where cafeteria workers passed out brown bags filled with turkey and cheese sandwiches, vegetables and fruit. "Do you want chocolate milk or white milk?" they asked, though the answer was usually the same.
Lessons from Hawaii: Tracking the right data to fix absenteeism
The Hechinger Report
Good school attendance is associated with all sorts of good educational outcomes, especially higher grades and higher test scores. It's obvious: if you're not showing up for school, you're not going to learn as much. But only 17 states track and report chronic absenteeism data, according to the Data Quality Campaign and Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization that advocates for more focus on absenteeism data and ideas for getting students to come to school.
NAESP applauds delay on use of test scores in educator evaluations
NAESP
NAESP commends the U.S. Department of Education’s recent decision to provide principals, teachers and students time to transition to new assessment systems by allowing states to request a one-year delay in using assessment results in educator evaluations. The decision comes more than a year after NAESP and other school leadership organizations issued a joint statement calling for a delay in penalties and sanctions on schools, principals and teachers resulting from new assessments.
3 school branding tactics to try this year
NAESP
Branding is about seizing the opportunity to tell customers — in schools' cases, students, parents and community members — why your product (your school) is tops. Try these three tactics from two popular 2014 NAESP Conference sessions to tell your school's story and strengthen your brand.
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Before the Bell is a benefit of your membership in the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP). For information about other member benefits, visit www.naesp.org or contact us at naesp@naesp.org.
Before the Bell is a digest of the most important news selected for NAESP from thousands of sources by the editors of MultiBriefs, an independent organization that also manages and sells advertising. The presence of such advertising does not endorse, or imply endorsement of, any products or services by NAESP. Neither NAESP nor Multiview is liable for the use of or reliance on any information contained in this briefing.
Feedback about an article? Contact NAESP Liaison Meredith Barnett at MBarnett@naesp.org.
Colby Horton, Vice President of Publishing, 469.420.2601 Download media kit
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