With over five million emergent bilingual students in classrooms across the country, it’s more relevant than ever that pedagogy, curricula, and classroom environments reflect the diversity of students.
Since 2016, CoSN has been honoring innovative school districts that address digital equity. This year, the prestigious Community Leadership Award for Digital Equity was awarded to Louisa County Public Schools in Virginia.
Today’s students face an unprecedented combination of challenges and issues that can interfere with their well-being and disrupt their learning, but there are also new opportunities to provide districtwide support for their mental health while helping individual students learn to help themselves.
Beginning in a new school, grade, or classroom can be a daunting prospect for any student. However, when English isn’t a student’s first language, the barrier to adaptation is especially challenging.
As plans for the next school year are being developed and finalized, the role and management of educational technologies remain key considerations, even with the return to on-site learning.
Equity—making sure each student receives the specific resources, support, and opportunities they need to succeed—is a process. It can neither be planned for nor achieved all at once, and the target keeps moving, as was discussed during the edWebinar, “How to Improve Equity: One Step, One Goal at a Time.”
Everyone in the United States speaks a dialect—not a different language, but a variation of American English. Yet when children come to school, the expectation is that they will automatically understand that they need to read, write, and speak in the academic English of the classroom.
Students are grappling with greater complexity these days. Their struggles often become apparent in school and in the form of trauma. It’s hard for them to cope, and it’s difficult for teachers, who are typically not trauma informed, to help them.
The conversation about equity is spreading in classrooms all across the United States. Ask any educator and they will tell you how important it is to ensure equal access to opportunity for all students. But converting this conversation into action in order to close the existing gaps is not always a straightforward process. In fact, many schools don’t know where to begin.
While schools are wrapping up the 2021-22 school year, presenters on the edLeader Panel, “Finishing Strong: Top Issues for District Leaders as Summer Approaches,” urged administrators to look forward. During their discussion, they identified three key areas district and school leaders should focus on for the 2022-23 school year.