The most common observational methods used in schools tend to focus on teaching rather than learning and so often fall short of measuring the impact of the teachers’ hard work. This article discusses the discipline of Effective Learning Observation (ELO), which is expanding in popularity and usage across the US as school leaders seek better ways to measure the quality of learning in their schools, and to inform more impactful improvement strategies.

As current school leaders, we have to be mindful of how we will create school cultures that will support the social emotional needs of our teachers and students and their families. Now more than ever, there is a need for people to share and understand as we seek to make sense of our world today. There is a need to begin emotional and psychological healing but that can only happen when we create safe spaces to share our anxieties and fears.

The varied ability across classrooms in the United States is, oftentimes, a daunting challenge for today’s teachers. Considering the limited time and resources available in which to meet all those needs, leaves the educator asking the question, how do I divide my time, resources and myself in order to effectively meet the needs of all my learners? This article will examine how teachers can leverage high impact, research based instructional literacy principles and strategies in order to achieve academic growth across all content areas.

In today’s reality of standards-based instruction, it has become increasingly challenging to ensure that all students receive high quality and equitable access to a culturally relevant education. For English language learners (ELLs), the challenge is even greater. ELLs are faced with the task of acquiring content knowledge while learning a second language. As the number of ELLs throughout the United States continues to increase, it is critical that teachers, both mainstream and ELL specific, consider how best to enhance ELLs language proficiency in order to increase understanding of academic content. This article seeks to equip teachers with different ways to support and engage English language learners in the mainstream classroom.

As school begin to address the challenge of reopening schools, a greater concern of how to address learning loss created during remote instruction has taken center stage. Now, more than ever, administrators, teachers and families continue to question how best to meet the learning needs of their students, especially after losing more than a quarter of the 2019-2020 academic year to the current pandemic. One recent study, conducted by NWEA, predicts that students will experience a learning loss of 30% in reading and as much as 50% in math as a result of the pandemic. Left untamed, these types of academic setbacks could have significant negative implications for students who were previously preforming on grade level and even more disastrous for students who were already behind. This article hopes to discuss the how differentiation practices can be leveraged to address lost learning during pandemic remote instruction, while also highlighting procedural steps to effectively accelerate learning.

Nineteenth century American social reformer Henry Beecher once said, “The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.” For centuries, philosophers as well as scientists have strived to intellectually to explain how the brain processes as well as incorporates new information. Consequently, the how/what the brain learns has dramatic implications for how students perceive themselves. Although it has only been in the last few decades that strides in cognitive science have revealed new information about how non-cognitive factors influence student learning. This has provided tremendous insight and generated new implications for classroom instruction.

School leaders tasked with school improvement face a daunting challenge. As the bottom 5% of schools within the U.S are identified in need of school improvement based on, among other factors, proficiency on standardized tests, school leaders and their constituents face often unique and alarming sets of circumstances when confronting such problems. Oftentimes available improvement strategies can appear numerous, overwhelming, extravagant and time consuming. Time, in many cases, is not an unlimited resource gifted to school improvement leaders and personnel. The brilliance of quality action planning, when done strategically, offers school leaders a targeted cost-effective game plan to address the unique needs within a school building. This article will examine and discuss key factors leaders should consider in order to facilitate action planning that delivers authentic results.

The comprehensive needs assessment, or program evaluation, of a school is actually a pretty difficult review to get right. Getting it wrong impacts your staff, your culture, and ultimately your students. So, in this guide we explore seven things that, in our experience, you need to do to ‘get it right’ and optimize the value (and meaning) your school derives from the process….

The rapidly growing number of English Language Learners, as well as the linguistic diversity found within many of those student groups, presents a unique set of challenges for today’s educators. Through the use of effective co-teaching implementation, educators can strategically address the individual needs of their respective ELL populations while maximizing student achievement for all.

he double-edged sword of national and statewide mandated accountability tests for English language learners (ELL) does not go unnoticed by policy makers, administrators, principals and teachers. On one hand, English language learners are defined by federal legislation as unable to meet challenging State academic standards (ESEA, Section 8101 (20)), yet on the other hand, they are expected to meet these same standards as defined by state accountability tests.