Learning Links for February 2018 - The Best in Education This Month!

Here are this month’s best articles, analyses, and stories in education from across the web! This month you’ll learn about a visionary school trying to meet the needs of students in foster care, 30 of the most popular trends right now in education, and Harvard’s recommendations for building resilience in kids. We also share a brand-new website from Education First that provides lessons and resources for implementing social and emotional learning.

Innovation in Indianapolis with Aleesia Johnson (Thriving Schools)

What you’ll learn: “States across the country have struggled with encouraging innovation in their schools. But not in Indiana. In this piece, we chat with Aleesia Johnson about the creation of Indianapolis’ Innovation Network.”

Fostering Independence, One Student at a Time (Teach For America One Day Magazine)

What you’ll learn: “One 2016 study estimates that nearly half of foster youth are incarcerated within two years of aging out of the child welfare system. In this story, Jessica Nauiokas, a principal, shares what she has learned from a decade of cultivating a school to meet the academic and emotional needs of students in foster care.”

The Big Picture: Integrating SEL Across a District (Edutopia)

What you’ll learn: A video clip that shows how “the 168 schools in the Nashville district collaborate to bolster school culture and instruction with social and emotional learning.”

How Do You Teach to the Standards When Doing Project-Based Learning? (John Spencer)

What you’ll learn: “In my drive for authenticity, I had created pseudo-context. In my rejection of cookie cutter learning, I had turned the PBL process into something cookie cutter . . . It was a hard lesson in how to align the content standards you have to teach with the project-based learning that leads to student voice and choice.”

30 of the Most Popular Trends in Education (Teach Thought)

What you’ll learn: A great list from the Teach Though staff about what’s on the mind of other educators right now. More importantly, every idea contains a list of links and resources to dig into the topic further.

Coaching Words: You Don’t, You Didn’t, You Must, We Will (Teach Like A Champion)

What you’ll learn: “We’re really disciplined as coaches to always talk about what we want to see, the desired outcome, not about what went wrong or what the mistake was. We have to be disciplined about how we use our language. We always talk about the next thing you can do right. It’s always about what we want to have happen.”

Resilience for Anxious Students (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

What you’ll learn: “How school counselors can manage and mitigate anxiety – by focusing on coping strategies and schoolwide supports.”

What the Screen Time Experts Do with Their Own Kids (NPR)

What you’ll learn: “Parents today struggle to set screen time guidelines. One big reason is a lack of role models. Grandma doesn’t have any tried-and-true sayings about iPad time. This stuff is just too new.”

What’s the Right Amount of Homework? (Edutopia)

What you’ll learn: “Decades of research show that the issue is more nuanced and complex than most people think: homework is beneficial, but only to a degree. Students in high school gain the most, while younger kids benefit much less.”

New Website Resource:

Social & Emotional Learning Teacher Practices (A partnership site between Education First and NoVo Foundation)

Purpose: “This site is for teachers, and for those who support them in delivering excellent instruction. It features the work of educators who are integrating social and emotional learning into their classrooms, with lessons about how to develop your own SEL teaching practice and help your students develop these important skills and competencies to thrive in the classroom and in life.”