This paper marks the second in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. Twenty-first century skills (21CS) are now…

Background: Hands-on activities and makerspaces have rapidly gained popularity in recent years. One of the reasons for this is that they have the potential to stimulate interest and identity development in STEM or STEAM. Taiwan has organized many technology and science competitions for students to raise their interest and creativity in the past…

In response to the needs for kindergarten principals to foster teachers' capacities and commitment, this study examined the relationships between professional learning communities, principal leadership practices, and teacher commitment to kindergartens among 2106 teachers from 153 Hong Kong kindergartens, analyzing by using multilevel structural…

The current study describes the process of a participatory consultation framework, the Participatory Culture Specific Intervention Model (PCSIM), to plan and implement a data-based decision-making framework. The framework integrates proactive and systematic identification of emotional and behavioral needs as well as cognitive psychology techniques…

While federal law requires public schools to provide students with disabilities a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, students with extensive support needs are excluded from general education at alarming rates, raising concerns about equity of access to education. Purposeful school systems in which students'…

The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE 2023) promotes a number of principles that are central to the work of the STEMSS (STEM + Social Studies) project. Among these principles is the understanding that geography education is a bridge to better understanding and appreciation of all subject matter. Using geography education as a bridge…

The Bitmoji classroom craze swept education during online teaching and learning in 2020-21. Was that just a fad for pandemic times, or do they retain value in post-pandemic K-12 education? In a recent survey of 72 educators that included 45 school librarians, 71%, mostly at the elementary level, reported that they still use them. The purposes…

The students at the author's alternative, academic-recovery school come from their base schools and at the author's school are able to rewrite their own school stories. Some of that rewriting naturally happens in the library. Many of the students have experiences at multiple schools, but it is not until they come to the author's school that many…

Students are active in shaping the implementation of any curricular intervention. At Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), more than 1,500 students in Grades 1 to 6 were recipients of the William & Mary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum units. In this article, we share students' perceptions related to the following three…

Historically, Northern Ireland pupils have attended religiously separate schools, however, a movement by parents in the early 1980s to educate them together resulted in integrated schools becoming part of the educational landscape. Some were new and planned (Grant Maintained Integrated (GMI)) and a second group on which this article focuses sought…

Motivating students to learn and engaging them in the learning process is a constant struggle among teachers. The lack of motivation and engagement in reading lessons is one-reason elementary students are struggling to reach proficiency in reading. This systematic review used current literature to investigate the best practices seen in elementary…

Video games are a medium most students are familiar with; thus, they can be used as educational tools to meet the needs of twenty-first-century students. Given the popularity of video games with teenagers, they can be incorporated as educational tools in the science classroom. However, the affordances of using Minecraft Education (Minecraft…

Conditions of mass displacement and other complex crises create a need for widely accessible teacher professional development opportunities. This article reports on the forms of value created for participants through a scaled-up collaborative online peer-sharing experience developed to support teachers in challenging environments to become…

This article reports the outcomes of research on student teachers' situational engagement during their third-year teaching practice in university-affiliated teaching schools (teacher training schools) at the universities of Helsinki, Finland and Johannesburg, South Africa. We have explored situations that possibly engage the student teachers…

Traditionally pre-service teachers are undersupported as they develop culturally sustaining family engagement strategies through teacher preparation programming. As COVID-19 forced teachers, and in turn student teachers, to teach virtually, we explored how this setting affects student teacher access to students' home lives and families and impacts…