EdSurge

For over 30 years I’ve been teaching teachers to engage in meaningful conversations with their students about real things. Strong teachers know how to pose thoughtful questions, elicit questions from students, and listen and engage respectfully with students. And yet, 30 years in, there are still a shocking number of schools where adults and children fail to discuss important issues. For instance, according to findings recently released by RAND’s American Youth Panel, only about 1 in 3 students

To be an educator and a writer is to inhabit a rollercoaster world of hope; at times, you are filled with the excitement and power of possibilities, and at others, you are terrified of losing it. During the Voices of Change fellowship, I not only grew as a writer but was also inspired by educators who gave me the gift of “freedom dreaming.” I’ve since sought opportunities to practice freedom dreaming daily in the classroom. Embedding joy and equity into the curriculum and building authentic rela

While schools have made progress in technology adoption — from artificial intelligence guidelines to vetting education technology — they still struggle with the lack of resources, funding and expertise, according to a new report. The annual State of EdTech report from the Consortium for School Networking polled roughly 600 chief technology officers for K-12 schools. One of the biggest takeaways, according to CoSN CEO Keith Krueger: AI adoption is higher than ever. According to the report, nearly

For the past few years, our nation has been flooded with headlines declaring the demise of the college degree. This trend was exacerbated by COVID-19, which accelerated a decline in college interest.I understand, really, I do. Tuition costs are rising. Student debt is real.Rita Finkel is co-president of the Armory Foundation and Director of The Armory College Prep program.Artificial intelligence (AI) is also reshaping white-collar work by automating routine cognitive tasks, changing hiring patte

Increased attendance, better attention in classrooms, stronger friendships, and more engaged citizens – these are not a long wishlist of preferred traits in an elementary school student. They are what some advocates believe are a direct impact from recess. Recess, long a staple in children’s school days, has been put on the back burner or cut entirely by some districts as the push for more class time, higher academic performance, and increased test scores take center stage. Recess advocates are

The U.S. Surgeon General’s office issued a warning yesterday about the harms of extended uses of screens on children, raising concerns about its impact on academic performance, physical health and mental well-being. The advisory follows a contentious debate over screen time that has been fraught in recent years as schools that implemented 1-to-1 device ratios amid the pandemic now struggle with student attention, behavioral and mental health issues that took root around the same time. The latest

As one fourth grader peers over the top of a 300-foot-tall wind turbine, a classmate stands next to surgeons operating in an emergency room. Nearby, another fourth grader shuffles through an autobody shop. They are not visiting high-risk job sites, at least not in real life. These experiences are the result of a series of investments into virtual reality in North Dakota. The state hopes that putting VR headsets with career-focused software in classrooms will eventually boost local employment. Wh

Keri Rodrigues, a mother of five boys, knows the value of screens. For her boys, four of whom receive school accommodations, screens serve a practical purpose at school.“When you get a kid who's got [a learning plan] for anxiety and a substitute teacher that hasn't read his 504 [plan] and there's nobody there to de-escalate him, he's got to use his phone to call mom so I can FaceTime with him and do a breathing exercise,” Rodrigues says. But this use of screens bumps against a new concern. Fuele

Elementary school is tough. There are playground politics, multiplication tables and learning to read. Imagine dealing with all that in a new language — or even a whole new country. That’s the added challenge for kids who are learning English at the same time they’re learning everything else as their peers. It’s an issue that Sarah Walters and her colleagues were determined to tackle in Troy City Schools, a public school district made up of nine campuses roughly an hour north of Cincinnati. The

A cyberattack against one of the world’s largest digital education platforms has forced attention onto the vulnerability of U.S. schools’ data. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, a learning management system used by thousands of schools which has 30 million active users, had its service interrupted late last week. According to a company statement, hackers breached Instructure’s “free for teacher” account, or those specifically offered to give teachers access to Canvas courses. The criminal

Bullying. Isolation. Stress. Everyone experiences these on the journey from adolescence to adulthood, but new data on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth shows the additional pressures they face increases their risk of suicide compared to their peers. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth, has released its most recent survey of 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people 13 to 24. Among the most concerning figures was one in 10 participants reporting that they had attempted

Among the increasing concern about screen time in school comes a new culprit: the vetting process for school software. A growing group of parents and teachers has spent the last few years fighting against cellphones in the classroom, with some extending that to all digital devices. But the school-issued laptops, and the software accompanying them, have been left largely unscathed. “A lot of the issues with personal devices can move to the district-issued devices,” said Kim Whitman, co-lead for S

AI and technology are fundamentally changing what it means to teach and learn, and schools across the country are reimagining their instructional approaches, roles and systems to ensure students receive an education that meets the demands of today — and tomorrow. To navigate this shift, the ISTE+ASCD Voices of Change Fellowship empowers the people closest to the classroom to lead the conversation. By highlighting first-person essays and multimedia stories on EdSurge, the program provides a platf

School’s (almost) out for summer. When it comes time to throw open campus doors for the new school year in the fall, research tells us one out of every seven teachers won’t be returning — either because they moved schools or left the profession entirely. But when the going gets tough, teachers don’t necessarily want to leave. Even when they’re burned out, they still love what they do. So, the concerning data throughout the country tells a story about how stark the conditions of the teacher workf

Global data on math achievement is revealing a dismaying trend: Girls are doing worse than boys — and the margins are huge.Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.In 2023, fourth-grade boys outperformed their female peers in a vast majority of schools, growing the gender gap that existed prior to the pandemic, according to an international study released last week. Among eighth-graders, the rate of boys scoring higher than girls increased exponentially since 2019, rolling back gains in

More four-year-olds are enrolled in state-funded preschools than ever before, but the quality and availability of preschool programs have experts concerned about creating a system of haves and have-nots. “If providing high-quality preschool education to all 3- and 4-year-olds were a race, some states are nearing the finish line, others have stumbled and fallen behind, and a few have yet to leave the starting line,” an annual report from the National Institute of Early Education Research states.W

In my application to the Voices of Change Fellowship, I quoted musician Olu Dara’s words to his son, the rapper Nas:Quit school if you want to save your own life.These words stunned me as an educator and student who understands the stakes confronting Black youth in education. Nas’ conversation with his father did not feel unfamiliar, nor did it feel cavalier; it carried the audacity Black folks have had to nurture and maintain to survive. Before I began writing for the fellowship, I reflected on

A group of third grade students gather around a board game on a Wednesday afternoon in a Charleston classroom, grabbing game pieces, discussing potential moves and reading out playing cards. The games are not Monopoly, Sorry, or any others of yore – they’re focused on identifying, and boosting, students’ strengths and weaknesses. It’s part of a shift in school districts’ gifted and talented programs. While many programs focused on a small group of high achieving students, instructors across the

In 2021, I was a demoralized educator: not burnt out, but demoralized. As I shared in my first article for EdSurge, demoralization occurs when teachers “encounter consistent and pervasive challenges to enacting the values that motivate their work.”That year, the pervasive challenges seemed obvious and communal. We were all navigating online platforms, figuring out how to replicate student services virtually and struggling to make up for lost time in instruction, social-skill development and rela

As the clock ticked down, schools were simply unprepared to be graded on their assignment.Federal disability law has required local governments to make their websites accessible for decades. Two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice published a “final rule” spelling out how schools could measure whether their websites and mobile apps were accessible for students with disabilities, relying on widely accepted guidelines. The agency also set enforcement dates ba