America has only a few great educators. For the last 50 years, Siegfried Engelmann has been one of them.

His passion was to figure out what worked best in the ordinary classroom for ordinary children. He was, shall we say, in love with practicality and empiricism. You come up with ideas, you test them, and then you refine them. You do not impose your ideas on children until you have proved that your ideas are the best possible ones.

 You might notice at this…

All-important and overlooked: classroom management

A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality investigates the extent to which America's traditional teacher-preparation programs offer research-based strategies for candidates to better manage classrooms from the outset. Most programs can correctly claim at least some classroom-management instruction, but it's often scattered throughout the curriculum. Most…

Community schools: It's time

Efforts to create full-service community schools that serve the whole child with an array of services are gaining traction under California's new education funding formula, writes Jane Meredith Adams for Ed Source. The convergence of more money for low-income students and a new mandate to work with families under the Local Control Funding Formula has created an environment in which community…

The Critical Words Your Students Must Know for the Common            Core State Standards!

by Marilee  Sprenger

http://www.marileesprenger.com/the-critical-words.html

Researchers estimate 85% of achievement test scores are based on the vocabulary of the standards. Students from poverty, ELL…

Mommy, It’s Only A Game

(Has competitiveness gone too far?)

By

Dr. Louis. C. D’Aquila, D.A., CFT

Email: ldaquila@verizon.net

About the author: The author of this article is a retired teacher, former varsity track and soccer coach and adjunct college professor. Presently active as a…

Are Kids Sports Pricing Themselves Out of the Market?

10 school initiatives that never go away

Posted By Meris Stansbury On December 16, 2013  In Featured on eSchool News,Opinion,Policy,Top News | 

Poetic Novels

In this School Library Journal article, author Terry Farish explains why poetic novels are a natural form for historical fiction, stories of displaced people, and struggling readers. Here are some of the reactions she gets from students:

• “The verses are like tweets, a short form that our brains are adapting to.” 
• “The story is told in images, and it’s like you’re seeing frames in a…

Albert Lynd published his marvelous book attacking the Education Establishment in 1953. He is one of our smartest education critics. He explains each weird thing the professors are doing.

The bad news is that everything he talks about is still going on today. The dumbing down of the public schools was already half-accomplished 60 years ago when he wrote "Quackery in the Public Schools." But the experts in charge never…

The Spark of Lifelong Learning

“Scientists have recently made a remarkable discovery,” says author/journalist Annie Murphy Paul in this article in School Library Journal. “They have identified a force, commonly found in classrooms and libraries, that makes people think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. This force has the power to transform struggling students, and to lift high-achieving students to a new…