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…

Most of us will never be so great but all of us can be 'a little bit Mandela.' Those of us who choose to lead in education know the calling to make a difference in the world. We have followed it and made it our own. Most of us will not be asked to sacrifice as he did nor will the differences we make be as large. For those like Nelson Mandela and Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung who set extraordinary examples for us, we are grateful. They spent themselves on worthy causes. Their…

Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD…

This is a really nice infographic with some pretty nice ideas about getting kids into reading. Are there any ideas they've missed?

Credit to
Love Reading 4 Kids

Caroling with Education Reformers

Russ on Reading 

Russ Walsh

Does the Common Core Dictate Instructional Methods?

In this feisty Education Gadfly article, Michael Petrilli responds to recent articles criticizing supporters of the Common Core for going back on their initial claim that the new standards won’t prescribe how content is taught in classrooms. Petrilli and others have said that Common Core will bring about important “instructional shifts,” and the critics are saying, Aha!…