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.PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP
Safe Schools Week: Keeping students, faculty secure during pandemic
District Administration Magazine
Safe Schools Week is here, and there have been few more complex times to remain hazard-free and violence-free, than in 2020. Yet K-12 schools across the board are doing well with safety and security measures, especially in their communication and planning, according to experts from the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools.
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Want to enter a school building? Get scanned first
EdTech Magazine
Interactions at schoolhouse entrances look a bit different during a major health crisis. At some schools, there no longer are packs of students crowding through doors or parents lingering to say goodbye. Instead, school officials stand by — or drones fly over — scanning the temperatures of those seeking to enter the building. Infrared thermometers are a key technology K–12 schools are starting to use as part of efforts to prevent the spread of illness in school buildings.
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Leading in uncertain times by empowering others
Edutopia
There's a lot of debate about what it takes to lead and how to define leadership, but for me, leadership is using your influence to empower others. The challenges of this work are vast and ever-changing — and that was true even before the pandemic upended schools.
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A shortage of teachers and COVID-19 create a perfect storm for the education system
CNBC
The debate over how and where to educate students, from preschool to university, has been among the fiercest fought throughout the pandemic. Nearly every solution presents challenges for parents, students and teachers alike. The COVID-19 crisis and an ongoing nationwide shortage of qualified teachers have created a perfect storm in the education system that may only worsen in the months to come.
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COVID-19 could help us reinvent public education
eSchool News
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fundamental insufficiencies and inequities of America's education system, shaking its foundations in ways that make it abundantly clear we must take this opportunity to rebuild from the ground up, according to Real Clear Education. There is now urgency to create a more resilient, flexible system centered on learners' unique needs, circumstances, aspirations and interests, rather than institutions. We must reinvent our public education system so it can powerfully and equitably support each child in accessing rich learning resources and opportunities.
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5 lessons learned after PD paid for by CARES Act funds
District Administration Magazine
Professional development courses on how to implement distance learning are in high demand. School districts across the country are looking for ways to meet that need. Many are supporting professional development with federal funds and improving practices along the way.
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Enrollment is dropping in public schools around the country
NPR
Orange County, Fla., has 8,000 missing students. The Miami-Dade County public schools have 16,000 fewer than last year. Los Angeles Unified — the nation's second-largest school system — is down nearly 11,000. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina has 5,000 missing. Utah, Virginia and Washington are reporting declines statewide.
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This book helps you & your staff: understand sources of trauma identify signs of trauma guide conversations take necessary action reduce anxiety improve student mental health
It addresses the traumas of 2020 & helps you plan for future crises.
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How RFID can help in a school reopening
eSchool News
As schools prepared to reopen this past August and September, administrators had to consider more than usual. In order to ensure the safety of students returning to school, administrators had to evaluate school reopening strategies, social distancing efforts, cleaning policies and how to quickly identify symptomatic students.
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Don't let your guard down on these 7 items
District Administration Magazine
In the blur of school day, the amount of safety checks and balances for a school district to maintain is staggering. COVID-19 considerations, getting children on buses, clearing hallways during emergencies and keeping classrooms clean ... are just a few that can make the task daunting. Schools across the U.S. that have reopened in some fashion have done a remarkable job ensuring facilities are largely safe and free from incident, according to security experts who took part in a recent virtual session on school safety hosted by Allegion.
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Working families are in crisis. As we recover from COVID-19, we must rethink child care as an economic and public good
The 74
The child care industry is in crisis — and that means every working parent is in crisis. Prior to the COVID pandemic, more than half of Americans already lived in a child care desert, where demand vastly exceeded supply. Now, close to 40% of providers may close permanently during the pandemic, putting at risk about 4.5 million child care spots across the country. The crisis that has been exacerbated by COVID-19 is not new. Parents have long toiled to locate and afford reliable child care programs, often to no avail.
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Apothepack
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Feel-good messaging won't always motivate your employees
Harvard Business Review
The idea that your actions at work contribute to the betterment of society — to help protect the environment, end poverty, or promote social justice — is an inspiring one. Recent research suggests that it can be a powerful motivator too. Indeed, the once-monolithic view of financial incentives as the way to motivate employees has been challenged by a wave of studies showing that linking people's work to prosocial causes can motivate people in ways that transcend their paycheck or bonus.
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COVID-19 revealed a shocking fact about leadership
Fast Company
Prior to COVID-19 the world was already obsessed with leaderism, cleverly defined by Gianpiero Petriglieri as "an intoxication with leadership that harms us more than the ills we invoke leaders to cure." This person-centric cult of leadership was selling Hollywood films by the bucket and perpetuating our archaic fantasies of charismatic and narcissistic strongmen as not just ideal leaders, but the solution to all our problems.
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How to help employees manage their mental health and wellbeing at work
Inc.
As COVID-19 continues to redefine the way leaders communicate within and beyond the office, many are reeling from a rise in workplace-related anxiety and stress. A recent study by Mind Share Partners, in partnership with Qualtrics and SAP, showed a decline in the mental health of nearly half of respondents since the onset of the pandemic. Nationwide, almost half of Americans report the coronavirus crisis is harming their mental health, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
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3 mediation skills to help navigate conflict in times of uncertainty
Forbes
Organizations are facing turbulent times ahead. Not only are the U.K., U.S., and many other economies in recession, but there is no end in sight for the COVID-19 pandemic. As the continued uncertainty affects morale and well-being, minor irritations between colleagues can escalate and intensify to all-out conflict. It can be challenging for leaders to know how to support staff experiencing workplace conflict. With so many competing pressures brought on by the pandemic, it can be tempting to look the other way.
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18 ways to build a winning team
Inc.
Show up as your true self in front of your team every single day. There's this myth of the person who is hyper-confident, who has all the answers, who has an unshakable clarity of vision — that's not human and it's not true. When you bring people into your journey, they will go to the end of the world.
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5 ways to bring out the leader in your employees and deal with problems caused by poor leadership
Forbes
Often people placed in management positions are promoted based on their work or achieving a performance milestone. Unfortunately, these individuals may also have slim to no experience in leading others. This mistake happens more often than none by organizations and individuals believing one person's success can easily be distributed to others. Of course, this can take everyone in a less than desirable direction, impacting profits, production, performance and customer loyalty.
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The learning landscape is changing. Let us help you navigate it. Our experts are available for early-morning check-ins, or late in the evening as you reflect on your day. Bottom line: Leadership doesn’t have to be lonely. We’re here, day and night, to help you lead your schools into the future. Learn more
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Forget time management. Master this to meet all your productivity goals
Fast Company
Raise your hand if you no longer trust yourself to remember everything you need to do. Keep your hand up if you're so entrenched in knee-jerk reaction mode that the moment a "quick little task" pops into your head, you drop whatever you're doing and take care of it right away lest it slip through the cracks.
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.EDUCATION POLICY
CDC offers cautions, guidance for schools' COVID-19 testing strategies
Education Week
New guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gives a framework for school-based testing for COVID-19, detailing who should be tested first and how such screening should be incorporated into schools' overall strategies for controlling the spread of the virus. It suggests schools prioritize symptomatic individuals and those who've had close contact with those who may be ill with the virus.
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.SCHOOL TECHNOLOGY
With e-Learning, proactive network investments pay off
EdTech Magazine
For school districts across the country, the quick pivot to remote learning in the spring put their IT networks to the test. The demands of the new school year — with many districts implementing in-person instruction, remote learning or a hybrid approach — are also continuing to push the limits of schools' IT environments.
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What district IT teams can learn from the corporate world
eSchool News
Students have returned to virtual or face-to-face classrooms, but from a technology perspective, the average middle schooler now looks more like a corporate executive. Now, the biggest challenge facing school district IT teams is that their departments were not set up (or budgeted) for the unique challenges that come with the remote synchronous learning programs resulting from the global pandemic.
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Big ideas to redesign K-12 for the automation age
The Brookings Institution
Automation and artificial intelligence are transforming work at a dizzying pace. Rapid technological advances will require a forward-looking workforce that is ready to adapt. While much of the policy discussion has focused on the role of college, not all students attend college, and not all who do are ready for a rigorous technology-driven education. To prepare students for an increasingly automated future, we need to modernize K-12 education. This need is particularly obvious as children return to school this year; because of COVID-19, some students are learning online, others in person and others in pods made up of children whose parents can afford to hire personal teachers.
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 A child’s first few years of educational experiences set the stage for how they will learn for the rest of their lives. The Bank Street Early Childhood Leadership Advanced Certificate Program is designed for mission-driven educators seeking to advance their professional opportunities and fill the need for exceptional leadership in early childhood education. Areas of study within the program include curriculum and development, social justice, systems thinking, progressive education and law.
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Moving remote learning from reactive to proactive
eSchool News
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a stark digital divide within education, with many schools woefully underprepared for the shift to remote learning. When schools initially closed and transitioned to remote learning plans in the spring, many students lacked access to a device, the internet or both.
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How to protect student data when using online and emerging tech
EdTech Magazine
Schools need technology — a lot of it — to operate both remotely and in person. But there's another need that K–12 administrators should also prioritize, experts say: data privacy. "With the sheer volume and quantity of online services, districts should look at all the details," says Ed Snow, assistant director for the instructional technology services team at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. "Most of these technology systems are in the cloud, and there is data being transferred back and forth, so that piece of the puzzle has to be fortified and secured."
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.PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2020's new rhythm: Moving from virtual to in-person teaching (and back again)
We Are Teachers
It's been six months since COVID-19 blasted into our lives like a tsunami and disrupted just about every aspect of our everyday lives. Schools shut down, learning shifted online and everyone — teachers, students and families—tackled a huge learning curve to keep kids learning. Now, many schools are returning to in-person learning.
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Identify and Address Individual Learning Gaps
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Many students will experience learning losses and have gaps in their knowledge and skills.
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An adaptive math and ELA supplemental solution for grades 3-8 with over 1,100 learning objectives
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A data-driven look at COVID learning loss
eSchool News
Students across the country have missed months of school due to COVID-19 and are entering another year that's shaping up to be anything but normal. While the full impact has yet to be determined, the fear is that the COVID learning loss experienced during the pandemic could widen achievement gaps for those students furthest from opportunity. While the education system strives to provide all children with fair, equitable access to high-quality education, the sudden switch to distance learning during the pandemic has turned the spotlight on persistent inequities among students.
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MULTIBRIEFS EXCLUSIVE
Struggling learners' difficulties have intensified: Here's what can help
By Howard Margolis
In this chaotic, volatile, and frightening era of COVID-19, struggling learners' difficulties have intensified. Wherever remote learning has replaced some or all in-person instruction, many struggling learners have found it extremely difficult to focus, to understand, and to apply what teachers are trying to teach. What's the answer, the answer that will vanquish these problems? There's no one answer. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. But for some struggling learners, the suggestions in this article can help. They can help learners, they can help teachers, and just as important, they can help parents.
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SEL and the brain: Each student has a story
MiddleWeb
Students enter our classrooms with their own personal stories. Some of those stories are wonderful. Some are not. For those with positive stories, social-emotional learning helps reinforce the skills they need to succeed. For those with stories that include any degree of trauma or stress, SEL can help balance the negative experiences with positive ones.
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Yes, teachers are still being evaluated. Many say it's unfair
Education Week
For many teachers, stress levels are at an all-time high this year, as they navigate remote lessons, socially distanced classrooms, or a combination of the two. And there's yet another looming stressor: teacher evaluations. "You would think that given everything that's changing and everything that's brand new to teachers, that they would have figured out a way to skip a year," said Kristin Brown, a high school math and computer science teacher in Wisconsin. As a teacher, she added, you shouldn't have to "defend yourself and prove that you're an effective educator in a pandemic."
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Going beyond a diverse classroom library
Edutopia
You've diversified your classroom library — now what? We have been inundated with information telling us we need books that allow our students to see themselves in the text. We have created Amazon Wish Lists, DonorsChoose projects, and everything in between to make it happen. Now what? Unfortunately, for a number of teachers, that's that. All of these books will sit in the pretty bins that have been color-coded and labeled just for them. A student may glance at them every now and again, maybe even thumb through one during independent reading time. As far as these teachers are concerned, they have done their part.
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Why decades of trying to end racial segregation in gifted education haven't worked
The Hechinger Report
On a crisp day in early March, two elementary school gifted and talented classes worked on activities in two schools, three miles and a world apart. In airy PS 64 Frederick Law Olmsted, in affluent, white north Buffalo, 22 would-be Arctic explorers wrestled with how to build a shelter if their team leader had frostbite and snow blindness. Unusually for Buffalo's public schools — where 20% of students are white and 46% are Black — about half of the fourth grade class was white.
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Essential Skills has been providing comprehensive and affordable digital learning solutions for over 20 years. Try our popular online learning programs risk-free for 30 days! "Essential Skills has been a phenomenal resource to improve our students' literacy and math skills both at school and through our distance learning initiatives."
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Reach Your Prospects Every Week
Thousands of industry professionals subscribe to association news briefs, which allows your company to push messaging directly to their inboxes and take advantage of the association's brand affinity.
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Adapting reading comprehension instruction to virtual learning
Edutopia
Distance learning often requires students to work more independently than they're used to, so as their teachers, we need to adjust the ways we help them read instructional texts. We know that reading is an act of constructing meaning, so whenever we give students materials to read, we need to provide them with the necessary tools to understand those texts.
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Distracted learning a big problem, golden opportunity for educators, students
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau via Science Daily
Scanning social media while listening to a lecture. Watching a favorite television series while studying. Today's young people frequently juggle multiple streams of information and entertainment media while doing schoolwork, a trend that researchers call distracted learning.
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3 lessons learned about distance learning
Teaching Channel
Teachers are heroes. Who could have imagined a year ago that educators would be called upon to rapidly pivot from schooling as we have known it to remote learning? In a matter of days, districts around California were figuring out how to get devices, food and materials into the hands of students. Teachers converted to new platforms, and in the process, families gained an even deeper regard for what we do every day.
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7 things all kids deserve in remote learning
We Are Teachers
There's a lot that we can make work in remote learning. It's been amazing to see how teachers have found all kinds of ways to teach their students across a screen. There's also a lot that we can't control. In person we can rest assured that our students have equal access to materials and resources. But it's harder to give students an equal playing field when they're learning at home.
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Achieving equity in gifted programming
MiddleWeb (commentary)
April Wells, a contributor for MiddleWeb, writes: "Educational equity is a big topic, and one specific area of education in need of an overhaul is gifted education. In my years of working with students identified as gifted, I saw a pretty monochromatic view of what it meant to be gifted according to schools. It predominantly meant white and upper-middle class."
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.EDUCATION RESEARCH
No more snow days after COVID-19? These schools used online learning to cancel them.
USA Today
Years before the coronavirus hit, two rural school districts developed plans to put learning online. They were ready for a snowstorm and instead found themselves prepared for a pandemic. For the Bancroft-Rosalie Community Schools in northeast Nebraska, the move online took four years, gradually incorporating software into daily lesson plans to use during inclement weather or in place of hiring substitutes when a teacher was absent. The district used digital learning to abolish snow days — a trend that has expanded to New York City and could work its way across the country.
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School absences correlate to impaired air quality
University of Utah via Science Daily
In Salt Lake City schools, absences rise when the air quality worsens, and it's not just in times of high pollution or "red" air quality days — even days following lower levels of pollutions saw increased absences. Research is still ongoing, and the evidence isn't yet conclusive enough to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between air quality and children's absences from school but the correlation, according to Daniel Mendoza, a research assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and visiting assistant professor in the Department of City & Metropolitan Planning, merits further exploration. Mendoza and his colleagues published their results in Environmental Research Letters.
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COVID-19-fueled stress eating, inequities, lack of fitness expected to boost obesity, experts say
USA Today
Pediatricians and public health experts predict a potentially dramatic increase in childhood obesity this year as months of pandemic eating, closed schools, stalled sports and public space restrictions extend indefinitely. About one in seven children have met the criteria for childhood obesity since 2016, when the federal National Survey of Children's Health changed its methodology, a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found.
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Sneeze Guards allow for proper social distancing while keeping maximum capacity in the classroom. Made from clear acrylic, set up is easy. Made in Michigan. Variety of different sizes available.
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.IN THE STATES
California school districts struggled to prepare teachers for distance learning this fall
EdSource
Many California school districts offered a wide variety of training over the summer to prepare teachers for distance learning in the fall, but some struggled to offer enough to meet the needs of all teachers, leaving many to find training on their own. Many districts offered in-house trainers or hired teaching consultants. But in many places, training focused only on teleconferencing tools like Zoom and educational platforms like Google Classroom.
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.ASSOCIATION NEWS
Register for Virtual National Mentor Trainings
NAESP
Don't miss a unique opportunity to advance your career and strengthen the leadership skills of new principals. Your knowledge and expertise is critical to ensure the success of the next generation of school leaders. As with any career, mentors offer guidance and support to help others become highly effective leaders. Take the time to invest in yourself, your career and the principal profession with NAESP's National Mentor Training and Certification Program™.
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