In this interview, a special educator and sports writer talks about the role that baseball can play in bringing young people with and without learning disabilities together. He exemplifies how a game can provide extensive opportunities for social interactions and establishes why playing baseball is more suitable for teaching social skills to…

McGuire, Stevahn, and Bronsther (2019) focused on civic education in elementary grades, an important but sorely missing topic in schools. Using Storypath, a simulation-like approach to address the housing affordability in Seattle, the authors showed how motivated and engaged students were with the topic. A major strength of the study is the…

Though there is extensive research on the health outcomes of individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), society at large has not embraced this ground-breaking research and many still believe that the use of harsh punishment for students provides the same intended result as a discipline approach that teaches coping…

Darwich (2020) asked "What Kind of Citizens Do Educators Hope Their Students Become?" in her response to "Storypath: A Powerful Tool for Engaging Children in Civic Education" (McGuire et al., 2019). She argued that civics should be rooted in social justice grounded by critical civic empathy, which requires focusing on power and…

The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance of education itself. It is not a distraction from the "real work" of math and English instruction; it is how instruction can succeed. And it is not another reason for political polarization. It brings together a traditionally…

Calls for schools to pay heed to children's social and emotional learning have proliferated in recent years. Is the current enthusiasm for educating the "whole learner" a much-needed correction to the narrow concentration on academic skills in the modern reform era? Or is it a misguided retreat from academic rigor and an attempt to…

Sally Reis's research interests are related to talent development in all children as well as special populations of gifted and talented students, including students with learning disabilities, gifted females, and diverse groups of talented students who are often underserved. She is also interested in extensions of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model…

In John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," he outlines several critical failings in which social scientists bear a responsibility for potentially a great deal of damage toward children, society, and notably, the planet itself. The nature of the damage appears to be one of…

This article offers interview responses from Thomas Hébert, a professor of gifted and talented education in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. Hébert was previously a faculty member at the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. He has more than a decade of K-12 classroom experiences working with gifted…

Suor et al. (2017) present a compelling new evolutionary framework that offers an alternative interpretation of the well-established findings of cognitive deficits in children raised in harsh early environments. They argue that such findings do not convey a complete picture of those children's cognitive development, because children's cognition…

Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb provide an elegant and helpful framework that integrates neuroscientific and education research on social affective development in their article, "Embodied Brains, Social Minds, Cultural Meaning: Integrating Neuroscientific and Educational Research on Social-Affective Development." Based on previous research,…

Meria Carstarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, has nearly 20 years of experience in educational leadership, primarily in urban school districts. Her previous roles included superintendent in Austin, Texas, from 2009 to 2014 and administrator in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia. She serves as a commissioner and…

A growing number of advocacy groups, educators, and families are concerned that something important is missing from modern public education. They recognize the necessity of students making progress in their math and reading abilities, but they fear that a narrow focus on those subjects has caused schools to neglect other essential aspects of…

What do K-12 schools need to do to prepare their students for adult success? This was the question that originally catalyzed the standards-and-accountability movement some 30 years ago, though it seems somehow to have gotten lost. Today the question merits revisiting, because addressing it makes a strong case for taking an integrated approach to…

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are 'masters of nature'. For millennia, human "social learning" has allowed "Homo sapiens" to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success…