College- and career-readiness skills can easily get lost if you don't have a clear school-wide plan for teaching them. While curriculum in schools is primarily meant to ready students for college and career skills, ensuring those skills actually transfer is another story. Andrew Miller lays out a system for teaching and assessing key…

New brain imaging methods are helping us better understand how children learn, writes neuroscientist John Gabrieli. But "education neuroscience" has become the source of both promise and debate.

Students need "critical data literacy" skills to help make sense of the multitude of information available to them, especially as it relates to high-stakes issues of social justice. The authors describe two curriculum modules they developed--one on income equality, one on immigration--that help students learn to analyze data in order to…

When a school weaves social-emotional learning throughout its curriculum and culture--both helping students tune in to emotions and teaching "emotional skills" for handling difficult feelings--students and teachers thrive. Brackett discusses ways to develop the emotional intelligence of everyone in the school and lists five key emotion…

As social-emotional learning has gained prominence in K-12 education, some educators have wondered how ASCD's Whole Child approach intersects with this movement. In fact, the Whole Child approach encompasses and overarches the components of social-emotional learning, as well as other holistic education models, and as such can serve as a helpful…

"A common and fair critique of online professional learning is that a lot of it is not very engaging," says professional development leader and expert Mike Flynn, who gives readers tips on how to wow their audiences with amazing online PD sessions.

Reading and analyzing texts with elementary students are perfect ways to introduce larger questions about the ways in which we interact with one another and the larger world. Boyles discusses how teaching social-emotional learning through literature can easily be incorporated into reading routines already in place. She includes three sample…

A veteran educator tells stories of four children she taught who each struggled with trauma and were at risk of disconnecting from school and sliding into tragic life outcomes. She shares lessons she learned from reaching out to each child and general lessons about helping students with trauma--including to never go it alone.

It is well documented that young children need social Interaction, self-determination, and play to learn. But in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, how does that translate to online learning? Psychologist and professor Wendy Ostroff suggests strategies and tips for engaging our youngest learners remotely.

When professional learning is interdependent, a teacher's individual success hinges on the efforts of the entire team. Leadership experts Jenni Donohoo and Ann Mausbach explain why that's a good thing.

New ed-tech tools crop up frequently, leaving teachers little to no time to become familiar with them or adapt them to learning. Professional development that focuses on tool-centered approaches are often insufficient to meet teachers' needs in contemporary classrooms. Therefore, teachers need to develop a level of comfort with using new…

School leaders could see all their students ascend to new heights of academic achievement and find their jobs de-stressed and joyful--if they focused on only the one or two most urgently needed instructional initiatives. Schmoker makes the "case for less" and notes that if school leaders applied strict criteria to select the initiative…

Charts that keep (public) track of whether a student's behavior is in some equivalent of a red (problem), yellow, or green ("well-behaved") zone are ubiquitous in elementary schools. This strategy based on shaming students is due to be retired because (1) it promotes only compliance, not social-emotional learning; (2) charts don't teach…

Authors of the newly revised Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Liesl McConchie and Eric Jensen offer whole-brain approaches teachers can take to engage students in new learning and retaining that knowledge.

Most students have gaps in their background knowledge and basic skills-gaps that can stand in the way of learning new concepts. For example, a student may be excited about studying probability--until he realizes that today's lesson on probability will require him to use fractions. As his brain searches frantically for his dim recollection of the…