Each new school year brings a promise of growth in students and teachers, as well as in professional learning. Teachers and administrators across the country prepare for the new school year by designing professional learning that is meaningful and engaging for their staff. Although educators could not have predicted it, post-pandemic professional learning in school districts across the country has changed dramatically.
Labor Day 2022—instead of the usual beginning-of-the-school-year exercises, Los Angeles Unified School District administrators had to deal with a ransomware attack that shut down its computer systems.
Building a multilevel program to support emergent bilingual students is an effort that no one educator can take on alone. During the edLeader Panel, “Best Practices to Support Emergent Bilingual Students This School Year—and Beyond,” Dr. José Viana, Senior Education Advisor at Lexia Learning and the former Director of the Office of English Language Acquisition, hosted a panel of experts who explained how to build inclusive and asset-based learning environments at the national, state, district, and school levels.
For any educator or administrator looking to build a comprehensive support system for students, the edLeader Panel, “MTSS: Taking Efficacy from Good to Great,” is a must-watch discussion. The panelists discussed how Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS) improve school environments, academic achievement, and student behavior.
Teachers and students suffered through COVID’s upheavals. With its dissipation come the aftereffects, from unfinished learning to teacher shortages. The pandemic furthered a lingering malaise linked to existing school gaps and challenges.
Mask mandates. Remote learning. Weekly testing and contact tracing. There are many elements from the past two years that educators are happy to leave behind. But there are also some innovations and opportunities, like virtual professional learning, that they don’t want to forget.
In the Fort Zumwalt School District in Missouri, Dr. Dan Boatman, Executive Director for Teaching and Learning, and John Barrow, Executive Director of Intervention and Behavior Support, are leading an initiative to build a sustainable social-emotional learning (SEL) program at the elementary school level.
Keep these tips top of mind during your edtech search: Just because tools are pretty doesn’t mean they correlate to academic achievement. Student engagement with a product does not equal learning. Research should inform any edtech selection.
With the ubiquity of the internet, there have been various iterations to the resume and portfolio development for job seekers—and to the recruitment process for employers. From the documentation of skillsets to the way that resumes are shared, there have been positive changes to the process that have allowed those searching for a job to make it easier for employers to find them.
Decaf. Cream. Sugar. No sugar. Iced or hot. If people are that particular about their coffee, imagine how they might feel about their professional learning, says Robin Knutelsky, Director of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Human Resources for Northern Highlands Regional High School in New Jersey.