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Education DIVE
Parental involvement is a considerable factor in student success, but achieving that engagement is sometimes easier said than done. Many students have two parents who work full time, and some parents may also still harbor negative feelings toward school from their time as students. To learn more about how administrators work to bring and keep families in the fold, we asked a handful of superintendents and principals from a variety of districts nationwide how they approach family engagement. Here's what they had to say.
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The Lead Change Group
Master Teacher Wardie Sanders recently retired after teaching history for years at Hartsville High School. There are a lot of great teachers in schools all around the country who are only known to other teachers and in their own community. The news media are more likely to devote time to a violent crime or devastating fire than to the everyday work of great teachers. Wardie was an exception.
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Education DIVE
The mission of the Jefferson Education Exchange is to help teachers make informed decisions about ed tech and to make sure teachers' voices are part of "implementation-focused research evidence," according to the report. As part of its EdTech Genome Project, a database intended to help educators vet technology products, the organization is continuing to seek additional feedback from educators on the implementation variable that matters most at the classroom level.
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Entrepreneur
Building a team can be incredibly gratifying. Not only do you get to meet talented people, but you also get to help them become their best selves. All of that depends, however, on your ability to get along with the people you've hired. If interactions with even one member become tense, grin-and-bear-it experiences, the joys of team-building evaporate. Left unaddressed, stressful employee relationships can sour the company culture for everyone.
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LINC, The Learning Innovation Catalyst’s comprehensive Digital Tool Box can guide your selection of engaging and effective digital tools to use with students. Download it here. LINC supports educators as agents of innovative classroom transformation, equipped to prepare all students for their rapidly changing world.
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By: Anne Rose (commentary)
 Here's the quandary: you've allowed an employee's unacceptable behavior to continue long term without serious repercussions. Now what? You personally like this employee. When she's at work, she does a good job. Co-workers and customers like her. The problem is her chronic absenteeism or tardiness, for example. You tried talking with this person months ago, which resulted in a lot of tears that only made you somehow feel guilty for hurting her feelings. She promised to improve, and for a couple of days, she did.
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HR DIVE
The traditional annual performance review can't provide the culture of feedback that many HR professionals are striving for, a 2018 Betterworks study concluded. Check-ins on progress and periodic feedback should be used to manage and continuously motivate employee performance, the group said.
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HR DIVE
While more workers are paying attention to flu prevention, many still feel pressed to come to work sick. A 2018 Walgreens survey revealed that 40% of workers admit coming to work with the flu. Employers can't afford to dismiss the serious consequences associated with such actions. The 2018-2019 flu season was one of the longest on record — and this year's season has started early, meaning it could reach similar heights, according to the CDC. Productivity may suffer, but employers should encourage those with the flu to stay home rather than spread the virus to co-workers.
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Leadership Freak
What shape is your leadership? This isn't about being physically thin or round. What shape is most appealing to you? (Pick a shape you prefer before you read further.)
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By: Catherine Iste (commentary)
 Whether it is the cold weather sweeping across the country, the shorter daylight hours or the end of the year, many of my clients and colleagues have recently wondered aloud whether they are in the right place or doing the right thing. While questioning our professional purpose can be disconcerting, it can also be a healthy exercise. Here are a few tips for facing the big question of whether we are doing what we are meant to do.
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Harvard Business Review
Recognition and appreciation. We often use these words interchangeably, and think of them as the same thing. But while they're both important, there's a big difference between them. For leaders who want their teams to thrive and organizations that want to create cultures of engagement, loyalty and high performance, it's important to understand the distinction.
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MM&M
The Food and Drug Administration and partner Scholastic have expanded vaping education material to middle schools. This move came after a recent survey showed more than 5 million middle and high schoolers are e-cigarette users. The data found 10.5% of middle school students are e-cigarette users, which means about 1.2 million middle schoolers nationwide have used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. FDA data showed that number has doubled since 2018, when 4.9% of middle schoolers reported using e-cigarettes.
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Education World
New safety efforts in schools will be focused on prevention and school climate under a wave of federal grant money that is being awarded based on the recommendations earlier this month by the Federal Commission on School Safety. The funding, which is based on the suggestions of the final report of the commission, provides about $71.6 million to prevent incidents and increase mental health resources.
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THE Journal
Just as the school year kicked off, families on opposite sides of the U.S. faced temporary school closures. Mother Nature was responsible for some. But not all. While several southeastern states dealt with the effects of Hurricane Dorian, across the country, one Arizona city encountered a very different type of scare. Cybercriminals waged a ransomware attack on the Flagstaff Unified School District, forcing a two-day shut down for 15 schools serving almost 10,000 students.
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Edutopia
Developing executive function skills like staying on task and making their own schedules can help students manage their technology more effectively, writes Ana Homayoun in "How Intrinsic Motivation Helps Students Manage Digital Distractions" for EdSurge. She visited schools in 40 cities and surveyed students to determine how they felt about their current technology use and what changes might be made to balance their use of cellphones and computers with other goals — like finishing assignments, spending time with friends and family, or exploring hobbies.
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eSchool News
"Don't call it professional development — call it professional learning." Jill Abbott, senior vice president and managing director at SIIA, made this statement in a recent edWebinar. Additional panelists Jeff Mao, CEO of Edmoxie; Bruce Umpstead, director of state programs at IMS Global Learning Consortium; and Ilya Zeldin, founder and CEO of 2gnoMe, recommended that educational leaders take a deep breath and recognize that there is a crisis happening in our districts.
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Teaching Channel (commentary)
Ms. Van-Phanz creates an opportunity to adapt a regular assignment, so that students, who are developing their writing, can express themselves differently. One adaptation is having students draw out a map (either by hand or digitally) as a companion for their written poster. This gives a handy two-sided project with drawing on one side and writing on the other.
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Edutopia
Most teachers agree that social emotional learning is important, but teaching those skills in already crowded school day can be a daunting task. The cost — in both funding and time — can hinder schools from integrating social emotional learning into their daily activities, writes Arianna Prothero in EdWeek.
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Education Week
Personalized learning is all the rage in K-12 — or at least in some schools. John Davenport, a seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher at Corte Madera School in Portola Valley, Calif., embraced the technique, with encouragement from a former district administrator. But this year, he was told he had to reverse course, in part because of parent complaints. So what exactly did that look like for him? Education Week interviewed Davenport about his experience. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
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School Leaders Now
Today's students are more diverse than ever, and schools feel enormous pressure to meet all of their literacy needs. The importance of systematic and explicit phonics instruction has received plenty of press lately, but there's another crucial piece to the literacy puzzle: Background knowledge and vocabulary are also key drivers in students' reading success. Building literacy with content learning in an early literacy program is a valuable strategy.
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Education World (commentary)
Miriam Plotinsky, a contributor for Education World, writes: "A few years ago, I met a former teaching colleague for dinner. As conversation inevitably turned to shop talk and gossip, she shared a story about a fellow teacher who exited the profession. 'She just didn't feel like anyone recognized her work,' my colleague said. Generally speaking, a teacher looking for professional recognition on a continuous basis might exist in a deficit mindset."
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By: Brian Stack (commentary)
 The CompetencyWorks initiative of the Aurora Institute (formerly iNACOL) recently released an updated definition of competency-based education. Aurora developed the first nationally recognized definition for CBE back in 2011. That definition has provided a common understanding of the important features needed in CBE systems to schools and school districts from coast to coast. The updated definition reflects the evolution of CBE in the field as the model has grown to include schools from 49 out of 50 states.
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Wisconsin Public Radio
While keyboarding may be more practical for elementary school students to learn in the digital age, a state lawmaker says the benefits of learning cursive handwriting can't be ignored. "The process of writing cursive is better for young minds. It stretches their minds beyond the simple printing and certainly beyond the tapping of the keyboard," said state Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt, R-Fond du Lac, the sponsor of a bill in the state Assembly that would mandate cursive handwriting in Wisconsin elementary schools.
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MiddleWeb
If you would like to empower your students, give them choices. According to Scott Keller, a senior partner at the global leadership firm McKinsey & Co., having the ability to choose our own focus makes us five times more committed to the outcome. If students are more invested in their work, they are more likely to learn.
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THE Journal
Among 32 instructional practices examined in a recent research project, teachers' general instruction and classroom management — and not their prowess with reading and writing instruction — made the difference to student achievement. Four practices had the biggest impact: fostering student engagement, having students participate in discussions, having fewer class period disruptions and developing a classroom climate that was conducive to instruction. What didn't? Connecting lessons to the real world.
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By: Patrick Gleeson (commentary)
 It’s frequently asserted that the reason rich kids do better in school than poor kids has to do with their life experiences outside the classroom. The problem with this isn’t that it’s entirely wrong — like most things in life, the closer you look, the more complicated it gets. But this view lets our K-12 school system off the hook almost entirely. The reality is that a large part of the problem is that poor kids receive educations that are both inferior and different — they aren’t even taught the same way.
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District Administration Magazine
While several states have laws that either require or allow the use of cameras in special ed classrooms, some districts are pursuing their own school surveillance policies to improve student and teacher safety. Lyon County School District in Nevada recently installed cameras to continuously record special ed classrooms after the district board approved the policy in September, Margaret Heim, assistant to the superintendent, tells District Administration.
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EdSurge
The family engagement room at Belleaire Elementary School in the suburbs of Omaha is bustling on a late October morning. Kindergarten teacher Kelsea Heesacker comes in to chat with the school counselor and to grab a winter coat for a little girl who came to school without one. Meghan McCormack, whose job is to visit families in their homes, pulls on her own coat as she hurries outside to meet a mom whose kids aren't old enough for school yet. And Breanna Gruhn-McLaughlin, a family facilitator who plans monthly get-togethers for families, pours over a stack of manuals on how to nurture parent-child relationships.
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The 74
A new Results for America ESSA report suggests that "when it comes to using evidence to improve schools, state and local leaders don't always have to go for the most demanding option." The report includes "five ways to prioritize evidence in state and local spending decisions," emphasizing the importance of prioritizing evidence when making spending decisions.
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NAESP
What's love got to do with it? When "it" refers to leadership, the answer might surprise you. Love has a lot to do with leadership, says retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Col. Arthur J. Athens. In this webinar recap of "Leadership: What's Love Got to Do With It?" Athens suggests it's time to reconsider the connection between leadership and love, explaining that love just might be one of the genuine keys to extraordinary leadership.
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NAESP
A provision of the Every Student Succeeds Act requiring new public-reporting requirements is now taking effect that directly impacts principals. Federal law requires states to calculate spending of local, state and federal dollars by school and to make public a "per pupil expenditure." While states have been required to report at the district level — reporting down to the school level represents a significant change.
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