Deeper learning is great for exploring a topic in great depth, but it will fail if student motivation isn't taken into account. Researchers Eric Anderman and Adriana Calvit discuss how to align your deeper learning curriculum with motivational strategies for successful lessons.

Structured relationship-building teacher home visits have emerged as a promising method to increase parent engagement and improve student outcomes, but there is limited evidence on their effectiveness. The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to rigorously evaluate the impacts…

In this article Kay Owens explains how a real-world context can be used to encourage student noticing and deeper analysis of geometric structures when students are asked to draw what they saw. Kay presents examples of students' drawings made during a school trip to the zoo which followed a series of inquiry learning experiences in geometry.

Reading scores exist for a continuum of purposes, from informal assessment to formal standardized tests. This brief aims to answer the question: What matters most for elementary-grade teachers when thinking about reading scores, and what could policymakers do to help teachers? Three positions worth pursuing in this regard are shared: (1) every…

This article focuses on seven interacting research-informed domains. These domains are grounded in the research literature and have been applied in real world contexts to provide insight into, and an analytical tool for, meeting social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs within educational settings. Practitioner researchers applied the…

The standards from the Operations and Algebraic Thinking (OA) domain in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) build on one another across the grades (CCSSI 2010). Understanding each grade level's OA standards is necessary within the broader context of the K-grade 5 OA standards. In this article, the authors share their…

An alternative means of exploiting the benefits of children's storybooks when teaching primary mathematics is to be led by the story, rather than by the curriculum. This is referred to as a narrative-first approach, and contrast it with a curriculum-first approach (Russo & Russo, 2017e). The narrative-first approach involves first identifying…

Gesture is a powerful and frequent means of mathematical communication. It is a rich modality through which we may reach out to students and they may reach out to teachers, and this is particularly true for instances in which spoken language is not necessarily a commonality among classroom participants. Indeed, our movements help us share more…

Dr. Michael L. Wehmeyer has been recognized nationally and internationally for his research on intellectual and developmental disabilities and is well known as a leader on the concept of self-determination. His career has spanned experiences from the state system to higher education. He has been the recipient of several federally funded grants to…

The McKinney--Vento Act mandates schools to provide students experiencing homelessness or residential instability with access to a stable education by removing barriers to enrollment and attendance (National Center for Homeless Education [NCHE], 2014). Despite this federal legislation guaranteeing students the right to attend school without proof…

In typical school mathematics, students experience problem solving in different ways. Sometimes students learn about problem solving by being introduced to different strategies, such as making a table or drawing a picture. Other times, problem solving is presented as a context for applying previously learned mathematics skills and concepts.…

Multicultural texts are essential classroom tools because they create opportunities for all students to feel visible, included, and valued. In this summary paper, the authors begin with an overview of why multicultural literature and multiple identities have a place inside elementary and secondary classrooms. The authors then describe three…

This article provides a task that can be used effectively for exploring arrays in middle and upper primary schools, and the notion of prime and composite numbers in particular. As students are engaging in these activities, teachers can encourage them to record their arrays both diagrammatically and as number sentences.

In this article, the authors (a mathematics educator and a literacy educator) offer a framework to engage students with mathematics and children's literature through a read-aloud experience in which teacher and students engage with the text while problem solving. The authors describe the narrative-first approach as a strategy during which the…

Co-teaching offers a unique opportunity space for literacy instruction; however, this opportunity is rarely optimized and the result on students' literacy growth is often unimpressive. We propose that co-teaching is only a structural intervention, but it can become a powerful pedagogical intervention if teachers approach co-teaching as an…