Maureen Lamb, a teacher at Kingswood Oxford School in Connecticut, can see the telltale signs of test anxiety the moment her students enter the classroom. “They’re flustered,” she said. “And there’s a lot of negative self-talk as they walk in, like, ‘I don’t know anything. I can’t do this.’” 

Getting nervous at exam time is normal. But test anxiety becomes a problem when students’ cognitive skills are “short-circuited by the worry,” said Dr. Ellen Utley, a psychiatrist at the Jed Foundation (JED), a nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for our nation’s teens and young adults. High anxiety can impair students’ performance by limiting the executive function skills that enable them to focus attention and access memory, Utley explained.

To support students who are prone to being overwhelmed by tests, Utley recommended that schools urge students to avoid all-nighters and marathon study sessions in favor of healthy habits. “Schools can really message around good nutrition [and] good exercise as having a positive correlation with doing well academically,” she said. “So they’re not just focusing on good grades or studying as the only way to do well.”

When it comes to test preparation, which can reduce students’ feeling of test anxiety, teachers have a role to play. “When students feel like they are prepared for an assessment, they are far more likely to do well and not have their stress reach that level where they won’t perform as well as they had hoped,” said Lamb, the high school teacher. She offered advice on how to design assessments and assignments that reduce students’ unease and help them put their best foot forward. 

“A lot of them won’t ask for help in managing this type of stress. They’ll just try to push forward,” Lamb said. “Giving students the tools they need for preparation is really one of the best things I can do.”

The Three Fs of Assessments

When it comes to giving out assessments, Lamb makes sure to satisfy her three Fs: familiar, focused and flexible. This framework can support learners in preparing for tests and developing a better relationship to testing.

Familiar

When an assessment is familiar, students are not blindsided by the test’s content or format. Homework assignments are a low stakes way to prepare students for test content. “It’s just students getting that practice in to make sure they’re familiarized with the materials,” said Lamb. She no longer grades homework, but she gives students what she calls “the playlist” every night. The playlist includes an ungraded set of optional assignments like Quizlet online flashcards, a quiz, a review video or a game related to the material they are covering. “They can spend their time how they think it would be most effective,” Lamb said.

For the past two years, Lamb has given her students an optional practice test before every graded test. Although it has different questions from the graded test, students who take the practice version get an opportunity to hone the skills that will be assessed and get familiar with the test format. Lamb found that practice tests remove students’ fear of the unknown and make it easier to study without feeling completely overwhelmed. “A tiny bit of stress can be a motivator,” she said. “When it’s too much stress, I find that students shut down. So as much as possible, I try to keep students from shutting down by managing expectations.” 

Focused

Overly broad assessments can confound learners because their brains have to go in many directions to access the information they need. A focused assessment concentrates on checking students’ competency in a handful of skills at one time. “Clarity is kindness,” said Lamb, who only tests students on two or three skills per assessment. For example, she might give her students a test that covers just reading comprehension and writing. 

Narrowing the focus also makes practice tests more useful because they target the same skills as the graded tests. When students receive feedback on practice tests it gives them information about where they need to study more. Additionally, Lamb leaves comments on practice and graded tests to help students identify learning gaps. 

“Timely feedback makes a huge difference in whether or not students understand how they did and why they [performed] that way,” she said. Whether it’s after a practice test or after a graded exam, students can schedule time with her to talk through any feedback and figure out where they need more support.  

Flexible

Lamb offers students an optional retake exam with different questions from the original. Because Lamb provides prompt feedback, retakes can be scheduled during the week following the test so that students don’t feel like they’re falling behind.

Perfectionism and high stakes can contribute to test anxiety, so providing students with another chance to show what they know can give them agency over their assessment and reduce pressure. Also, Lamb knows that students have lives outside of class that can affect their test performance. “Sometimes students are going to be able to come in and give their best work. Sometimes that’s not going to happen,” Lamb said. “Sometimes they are just coming from a math test [or they’re participating in] two sports.” 

Many teachers may balk at the thought of creating practice, graded and retake assessments – a total of three tests per unit, but Lamb said it’s time well spent.  “I make [all the assessments] together at the same time,” she said. “It does take more time, but it is so worth it to have students feel better about the testing.”

Additionally, Lamb includes three ungraded questions at the end of her assessments so students can reflect on their test-taking experience and communicate any important information to her. She asks students:

• What did you find success with?
• What did you find challenging?
• What do you want your teacher to know?

Students have used the questions, particularly the third one, to inform Lamb about life events like a death in their family or that they had a test in another class on the same day. Once in a while she’ll read an answer unrelated to the test. “One student told me that they don’t like my shoes,” Lamb said. But criticism from students doesn’t keep her from seeking their feedback so she can find better ways to assess their learning.

“We’re asking our students to do things that are challenging and scary every day,” Lamb said. “Putting ourselves in an opportunity to have a growth mindset as teachers – just like we want our students to have a growth mindset – is really important.”

Why is it that some states, like Alabama, have more than $1,000 to spend on each student for each week of pandemic learning loss, and other states, such as Massachusetts, have only $165?

The answer, according to a January 2023 report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, is that $122 billion in federal pandemic recovery money has been allocated to schools based on the percentages of children from low-income families even though there’s not a tight correlation between the level of academic disruption and poverty. In some states, students are only six weeks behind where they were before the pandemic. In other states, children are almost a year behind. But the amount of catch-up money each state gets doesn’t reflect this disparity.

Understanding why pandemic learning loss varies so much around the nation is admittedly a “head scratcher,” said Emma Dorn, a co-author of the McKinsey report. Some states that resumed in-person schooling quickly, such as Florida, are behind states that relied more on remote schooling, such as Illinois. Minnesota, historically one of the higher performing states in the nation (it ranked first in fourth grade math in 2019) is now one of the furthest behind its pre-pandemic achievement levels with 24 weeks of learning loss. Meanwhile, students in Alabama, which ranked 50th in fourth grade math before the pandemic, are only three weeks off of their 2019 achievement level.

“It’s not the chart you’re used to seeing,” said Dorn. “When you look at the leading U.S. states in education, everything is kind of a little bit upside down. Many of the states who are historically really strong performers have really suffered in the pandemic.”

Time spent in remote learning, Dorn said, is only part of the puzzle. Remote learning itself varied wildly. Some schools set up effective Zoom instruction within days while others struggled for months to distribute computers. Even among schools that resumed in-person learning quickly, strict quarantine policies often sent students and teachers back home again. Other communities allowed classmates to remain in school. Many families chose not to send their kids back into school buildings even when the option was available. Finally, absenteeism has doubled and many students haven’t been in school regularly. All of these factors led to different learning outcomes.

Other educational reforms – such as teacher training and curriculum changes – may have tamped learning loss in some states. “You didn’t see as much learning delay in Louisiana,” said Dorn. “In fact, fourth grade reading continued to improve there. They were following what I call the Mississippi playbook of high-quality instructional materials aligned to the science of reading with professional development and teacher coaches. So when schools did go remote, there was still a playbook.”

Learning loss also varies within states. In Virginia, for example, the average learning loss was about 23 weeks, but there’s an extremely wide range between the highest and lowest performing students. The top quartile of students lost only 13 weeks of learning while the bottom quartile lost almost a year. New Mexico also racked up 23 weeks of learning loss, but both top and bottom performing students suffered similarly. There wasn’t a big discrepancy.

Different learning loss problems require different solutions, Dorn said. “In somewhere like Virginia, you might want to be thinking about high dosage tutoring targeting the kids who need it most,” she said. “In somewhere like in New Mexico, where all students have a similar kind of delay, maybe you want to double down on interventions that can be rolled out across all students: high-quality instructional materials with really effective professional development and teacher coaching.” (High dosage tutoring refers to a particular version of tutoring that has successfully helped struggling students catch up in rigorous research studies conducted before the pandemic; it involves daily tutoring with trained tutors using a set curriculum.)

McKinsey’s calculations are based on the 2022 scores from a federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP. Math and reading assessments were administered to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders in all 50 states. Biden administration officials described the test score drops from 2019, which ranged from three to eight points, as “appalling” and “troubling.”

What does the loss of a point mean in the real world? That’s also still not clear. McKinsey consulted with Harvard University professor Andrew Ho, an expert on education testing, and settled upon a calculation that equated each NAEP point with three weeks of learning. Then McKinsey averaged the results for fourth graders and eighth graders in both subjects, reading and math. That added up to an average of 12 weeks of learning loss across the nation. In other words, students in 2022 were three months behind students in 2019 at each grade level.

“We’re trying to get this message out to a broad audience so people understand what’s really happening,” said Dorn.

Three months might not sound gargantuan, but Ho warned that it will take much longer than three months to recover. “The key misconception to combat is that ‘time’ represents the time it takes to catch up,” said Ho. “If you’re three months behind a pre-pandemic cohort, it will take much longer than three months and at unprecedented rates of learning to catch up. If you’re running a race and you’re 10 seconds behind your friend, you can’t catch up in 10 seconds unless the other friend is standing still. You need to accelerate to catch up.”

Indeed, McKinsey calculated that it would take 28 years for eighth graders to return to pre- pandemic achievement levels based on the actual pace of academic progress in the previous 20 years.

McKinsey is hoping to persuade parents to pay attention. “As a parent, I have no idea if my kids are at grade level or not,” said Dorn. “I don’t know if they are ahead or behind from the pandemic. I can tell the impact on their emotions. I can tell the impact on their well-being. That is really obvious as a parent, and it was pretty hard. But with academics, it’s really hard to know.”

Even students with A’s and B’s on their report cards may have significant learning gaps. “I think the message is, be aware that there may be hidden learning delays,” Dorn said. “Your kids might have gaps. Listen to the school district, listen to the data that they’re sending, listen to the interventions that they’re suggesting.”

Understanding the extent of learning loss is just the first step. Schools have to decide which interventions to invest in and then embark upon the difficult task of building new programs. Spending recovery money is slow because even the process of obtaining bids and selecting outside vendors is highly regulated and complex. Hiring trained tutors and social workers can take many months. And millions of children are still waiting for help.

Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can’t we all just get along?

After all, we are now officially in an A.I. world and we’re going to have to share it, reasons the associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School.

“This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT,” Mollick told NPR.

Ever since the chatbot ChatGPT launched in November, educators have raised concerns it could facilitate cheating.

Some school districts have banned access to the bot, and not without reason. The artificial intelligence tool from the company OpenAI can compose poetry. It can write computer code. It can maybe even pass an MBA exam.

One Wharton professor recently fed the chatbot the final exam questions for a core MBA course and found that, despite some surprising math errors, he would have given it a B or a B-minus in the class.

And yet, not all educators are shying away from the bot.

This year, Mollick is not only allowing his students to use ChatGPT, they are required to. And he has formally adopted an A.I. policy into his syllabus for the first time.

He teaches classes in entrepreneurship and innovation, and said the early indications were the move was going great.

“The truth is, I probably couldn’t have stopped them even if I didn’t require it,” Mollick said.

This week he ran a session where students were asked to come up with ideas for their class project. Almost everyone had ChatGPT running and were asking it to generate projects, and then they interrogated the bot’s ideas with further prompts.

“And the ideas so far are great, partially as a result of that set of interactions,” Mollick said.

He readily admits he alternates between enthusiasm and anxiety about how artificial intelligence can change assessments in the classroom, but he believes educators need to move with the times.

“We taught people how to do math in a world with calculators,” he said. Now the challenge is for educators to teach students how the world has changed again, and how they can adapt to that.

Mollick’s new policy states that using A.I. is an “emerging skill”; that it can be wrong and students should check its results against other sources; and that they will be responsible for any errors or omissions provided by the tool.

And, perhaps most importantly, students need to acknowledge when and how they have used it.

“Failure to do so is in violation of academic honesty policies,” the policy reads.

Mollick isn’t the first to try to put guardrails in place for a post-ChatGPT world.

Earlier this month, 22-year-old Princeton student Edward Tian created an app to detect if something had been written by a machine. Named GPTZero, it was so popular that when he launched it, the app crashed from overuse.

“Humans deserve to know when something is written by a human or written by a machine,” Tian told NPR of his motivation.

Mollick agrees, but isn’t convinced that educators can ever truly stop cheating.

He cites a survey of Stanford students that found many had already used ChatGPT in their final exams, and he points to estimates that thousands of people in places like Kenya are writing essays on behalf of students abroad.

“I think everybody is cheating … I mean, it’s happening. So what I’m asking students to do is just be honest with me,” he said. “Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that’s all I’m asking from them. We’re in a world where this is happening, but now it’s just going to be at an even grander scale.”

“I don’t think human nature changes as a result of ChatGPT. I think capability did.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Can you imagine a class where students have uninterrupted time to play, dream and create with their peers? Giving students the room to be curious and imaginative is fundamental to building what former math and science teacher Christopher Emdin calls a dream culture. “If you give young people the space and time to play and dream, something is activated within them that supports them in every facet of their lives,” said Emdin, who is an education professor at the University of Southern California. He’s a firm believer that a dream culture is key to deepening students’ engagement and sense of belonging in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines. 

Students who are girls, Black and Latinx are likely to experience doubts about their STEM abilities due to the lack of diversity in these fields. According to Pew Research Center, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in STEM jobs. And while women make up half of the STEM workforce, they remain underrepresented in various professions, including computer and engineering jobs. Emdin’s book “STEM, STEAM, Make, Dream” outlines how teachers can make STEM education more inclusive, support students in reimagining their relationship to STEM subjects and help their learners become better dreamers. 

Show that STEM is subjective

STEM, a concept popularized in the early 2000s, merges together four powerful areas of study, and schools have increasingly sought to prepare students to pursue careers in these fields. Teachers may see objectivity and cold hard facts as the best way to promote rigor in STEM learning, but Emdin thinks this perspective is limiting because it does not acknowledge that life experiences and perspectives shape scientific inquiry. “To be objective is to be at a place of detachment from the human experience,” writes Emdin in his book. “It’s being at a place where one is not connected to how people feel or experience this world.” 

Recognizing subjectivity in STEM can make it more culturally relevant to students. Teachers who want to embrace STEM’s subjectivity can acknowledge that many cultures have STEM traditions that may not be included in textbooks. Additionally, women’s contributions to STEM have been largely erased. Emdin told MindShift that centering diverse people’s scientific and mathematical discoveries reveals how bias has long been a part of the discipline and invites students to connect to a more robust picture of STEM.

“Subjectivity means knowing who you are, where you are, where you’ve been within [STEM], and then bringing that to the discipline to help the discipline heal from its missteps historically,” said Emdin. In his book, he spotlights math educator Mario Benabe, who teaches high school students about indigenous methods for measurement and calculation, and ethnomathematician Ron Eglash, who created lesson plans about the math principles involved in cornrow hair braiding.

Embrace emotions in the scientific process

Emotions might not be the first things that come to mind when one thinks about STEM education. However, putting emphasis on feelings over facts can give students permission to bring their authentic selves to STEM classes. “For teachers with the goal to connect learners to STEM, the emotions that either exist or do not exist are essential to understand,” Emdin writes. 

For example, if a student feels frustrated because they’re struggling to balance an equation, teachers can reassure them that big feelings are natural when solving tough problems. Teachers may say that being frustrated doesn’t mean that they are not smart enough or that STEM is too hard for them. It could mean that they identified an area where they need more support, information or practice. Research shows that emotions can lead to deeper learning and enable students to access their passion for academic subjects. If a student is feeling apathetic, they may be communicating that they need more culturally relevant examples to stoke their interest and help them feel more invested.

“It’s not demeaning or anti-rigorous for you to begin conversations around STEM with emotion,” said Emdin. “We can teach that way and still get our intellectual rigor and academic heft.”

See students as scientists 

Students remember their bad experiences with learning STEM, which can lead to feelings of disconnection or fear. “I’ve seen children in sixth grade who, when introduced to a scientific algebraic formula, will literally shrink in their seats and break out in sweats,” Emdin said.

To help young people develop a positive STEM identity, he recommends that teachers point out students’ science-mindedness, which is “the skills, traits, attributes and dispositions of the most prolific and brilliant scientists and mathematicians of our time.” Instead of focusing on a student’s content knowledge or rote memorization, teachers can uplift skills that students are using all the time in social interactions and hobbies. For instance, a teacher might notice and compliment a child’s keen observation skills, analytical nature or the questions they pose. Then, teachers can note how well-known experts in STEM have these same traits. For example, they might mention that the way a student asks questions reminds them of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr.

“You start attaching their inherent characteristics that they’ve used to form their identity with STEM. And slowly you build upon those inherent strengths, and then you introduce more in-depth scientific skills,” said Emdin. 

Additionally, research shows that adding an arts component to STEM education, also known as STEAM, can provide another avenue for students to find their identities within these subjects. “The arts are the essence of our collective humanity that awakens us to our best selves,” said Emdin, who also serves as the scholar/griot in residence at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts and is the creator of Science Genius, a program that explores hip hop and science.

He also encourages educators to expand the “A” in STEAM to include two more words: ancestry, which invites students to consider cultural contributions to science, and authenticity, which examines how students can bring their full selves to scientific inquiry. “It’s essential for us to be able to deconstruct [STEAM] and then reconstruct it in ways that are more inclusive, more diverse, and more honoring of indigenous knowledge, of traditional knowledges and localized knowledges,” he said.

Dreaming can be powerful and transformative. When students have a strong STEM identity, they’re able to dream about themselves and the world in ways that weren’t possible before. “I think we need to offer that luxury to young people. Time should not just be an affordance of those who are privileged,” Emdin said. “Poor folks, Black and brown folks, and marginalized folks need to have the luxury of time to play and time to dream.”

Daniel Willingham is a University of Virginia psychologist who frequently engages in pop culture battles armed with academic research. He has made it a personal crusade to persuade teachers that the idea of learning styles is a myth. (Research evidence shows that we all learn through a variety of ways: visually, aurally and kinesthetically.) For years, he has complained that teachers aren’t heeding research about reading instruction, and that many educators are misguided when it comes to teaching critical thinking. Now, Willingham has shifted his focus from teachers to students. In his new book, “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy,” he points out all the wrong ways that students do homework, take notes in class or study for tests. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Q: You have almost 100 research-based tips on how to be a better student and almost all of them are just the opposite of what I did when I was in school. Don’t read over your notes to study for a test. Don’t use a highlighter when reading class assignments. Don’t combat procrastination through to-do lists. I’ve been studying wrong my whole life. Why is effective studying so counterintuitive?

A: Students are doing things that feel really effective at the moment. It’s not like these strategies are completely fruitless. They’ve made it to college with them. But they don’t know the counterfactual; they don’t know what would happen if they engaged in other strategies.

Q: It’s interesting that students may feel something is working even when it isn’t.

A: Right! The most dramatic example, which I write about in the book, is reading over your notes. It’s the most common study strategy and it’s bad in two ways. It’s not very good for memory. But it also increases this feeling of familiarity. And to me, probably the most surprising idea in the book is that you can think you know things. A strong feeling of familiarity leads people to judge that they know something. But it’s not the kind of knowing that’s going to be expected in the classroom. On a test, you need to connect information; you need to be able to explain it.

One of the best ways to study is to probe your memory. Create your own practice tests. Flashcards, I think, get a bad rap because there’s this idea that it’s just rote and it’s only going to be appropriate for learning vocabulary or something. But doing flashcards is essentially testing yourself so I think it’s a great idea. There’s no reason you can’t pose and answer conceptual questions in a flashcard format, including essay questions. This is getting you thinking about themes and connecting big ideas, and that’s going to be useful for studying.

Q:  A decade ago, you wrote the book, “When Can You Trust the Experts?”  In it, you showed readers how to evaluate whether a claim or an educational practice is based on evidence. If you were to apply the skeptical approach to your current book on study tips, what would you say? Why should we trust your reading of the research here?

A: That’s a great question. Initially I thought about trying to be super clear about the evidentiary status of each of these tips. They vary. I thought I would do a grading system, like a number of ducks between one and five, to show how much research evidence there is behind each one. But I decided that would bog things down too much.

There is a bibliography that describes the citations. You could ferret out the evidence for any particular tip based on what’s there. Candidly, I don’t make it super easy for the reader. The bottom line is that I’m kind of asking people to “trust the expert.” Sorry.

Q: What’s a tip that has a lot of evidence and what’s a tip that doesn’t?

A: The idea that probing memory is an effective way to help cement things into memory seems to be a fundamental attribute of learning. That’s been very, very broadly tested across different subjects and different ages.

A tip that doesn’t have much evidence behind it is tip number four, where I say to be thoughtful about when to read. To my knowledge, there have been no experiments done on this at all. Instructors will almost always say come to class having done the reading. And that makes perfect sense. If they are lecturing in a way that assumes that you have done the reading and have to a certain extent mastered it, they are going to go beyond it. But sometimes it’s really not true at all. It’s frequently easier to listen than it is to read. If things aren’t perfectly clear, you can ask the instructor questions. You can’t query the author in the same way. So that’s the sort of thinking behind why I give this tip. It may make sense to do the reading after the lecture instead of before. But I don’t know of any direct evidence that it will be more effective.

Q: I love that the cognitive scientist is giving us permission to procrastinate our assigned reading.

A: Hold on, Jill. Let’s call this being strategic about deploying our time.

Q: And for students who don’t want to read your book, you’ve made several TikTok videos on some of your study tips! More seriously, you’ve written two books that explain research on reading, “The Reading Mind” and “Raising Kids Who Read.”  What was your reaction to “Sold A Story,” Emily Hanford’s podcast about why schools aren’t teaching reading properly despite decades of research?

A: As someone who’s been writing about the science of reading for a long time, I can’t help but be excited and grateful to Emily Hanford for this reporting.

I think she basically got the research right. The idea that I think didn’t come across as clearly as it might have is that the importance of phonics instruction varies depending on what else the child brings to the table. Children who come to school with very strong phonemic awareness and very strong oral language skills frequently need less explicit reading instruction and phonics. Children who do not have those tools usually need more. The reason I think it’s so important is that it helps us understand how you could be an educator and downplay the importance of phonics.

I also saw complaints that “Sold A Story” didn’t talk about other important aspects of reading, like background knowledge. When something’s really complex, you don’t tackle the whole thing. But what does concern me is that it may lead to the impression that people like Emily think that all you need to do is fix phonics, and then you’re home free. So people who are not very receptive to this message now, may eventually say, “Well see, reading hasn’t been fixed. So therefore, you were wrong all along.”

This story about Daniel Willingham was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Excerpted from “Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six” by Maya Payne Smart. Published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.

Reading is taught, not caught. This phrase has been in circulation for decades, but it bears repeating with each new generation of parents, and it has never been more fully supported by compelling evidence. Learning to read is a complex, unnatural, years-long odyssey, and parents should bear no illusions that their kids will pick it up merely by watching other people read or being surrounded by books.

Parents are influential in helping kids navigate the twists and turns that lead to literacy. I offer five teaching tenets to carry with you. Don’t worry, there are no scripted sequences, rigid rules, or worksheets forthcoming. These are principles any parent can remember and apply with ease during long, busy days with young children. Some of the five you may know instinctually. Others may have never crossed your mind. All deserve to be hallmarks of the way we approach raising readers.

These touchstones are research-backed and parent-approved. Personally, I’ve found that returning to these principles, even now that my daughter is a strong, fluent, and independent reader, still makes a difference for her, me, and our relationship. Ultimately, they are calls to be a more patient, more responsive, and more purposeful parent in every context.

May you find the same comfort, wisdom, and practical guidance in them that I did. Take them to heart. Repeat them like mantras if you like. And remember, the sooner you embrace them, the better this journey gets.

It’s What You Say — and How You Say It

Spurring literacy development, like teaching of any kind, is about creating shared meaning between you and your little one. And that requires meeting them where they are, capturing their attention, engaging in back-and-forth exchanges, and also providing the stimulation that helps them to their next level. Parents’ actions such as asking questions vs. giving directives, introducing novel vocabulary, and arranging words and phrases in advanced ways all affect kids’ language development. But parent responsiveness plays a major role as well, for example how reliably and enthusiastically you respond to your child’s speech and actions. As Harvard pediatrics professor Jack Shonkoff puts it, “Reciprocal and dynamic interactions . . . provide what nothing else in the world can offer — experiences that are individualized to the child’s unique personality style, that build on his or her own interests, capabilities, and initiative, that shape the child’s self-awareness, and that stimulate the child’s growth and development.”

So we must have the awareness to let a child’s age or language ability affect the content and tenor of our speech. Studies provide evidence that infants and young toddlers, for example, benefit from conversations about the here and now with us pointing and gesturing to label objects in our immediate surroundings or on the pages of books we’re reading together. And parentese is the speaking style of choice. Slower, higher pitched, and more exaggerated than typical speech, it’s been thought to advance infants’ language learning because of the ways it simplifies the structure of language and evokes a response from babies.

With older toddlers and preschoolers, we should keep examining what we’re saying and how, but update the range of things we consider. It’s no longer necessary to speak at a slow pace or nearly an octave higher than normal to aid a child’s language development. By 30 months, the variety and sophistication of parents’ word choices may have a greater influence on kids’ vocabulary growth. By 42 months, talking about things beyond the present, such as delving into memories of the past or discussions of what will happen in the future, is positively related to kids’ vocabulary skills a year later.

While it’s unnatural and unrealistic to monitor yourself all day, the thing to remember is that our words and responsiveness fuel powerful learning for kids. Set aside ten minutes a day of mindful communication, focusing on your baby, your words, and the interplay between them. Over time the focused practice will create habits that spill over into other conversations, too.

Learning Takes Time — and Space

We live in a catch-up culture, where people feel perpetually behind and forced to hustle near the finish line after being waylaid by hurdle after hurdle. This contributes to the (false) belief that we can make up in intensity what we lack in good pacing. But we can’t cram kids’ way to reading.

Ask any learning scientist about the relative merits of massing study together versus spreading it out over time. They’ll tell you that spacing between sessions boosts retention of the material. The proof of the principle (known as spaced learning, interleaving, or distributed practice) shows up all over the place. Numerous studies across the human life span, from early childhood through the senior years, have documented its power. And there’s evidence of the benefits of spaced study across a wide range of to-be-learned material, such as pictures, faces, and foreign language vocabulary and grammar.

Even learners taking CPR courses performed better if their classes were spaced out. So if you want your child to remember what you’re teaching, digging into it for ten minutes a day for three days likely will beat a half-hour deep dive. The spacing effect is among the field of psychology’s most replicated findings.

Incidentally, a study found that a bias for massed learning emerges in kids in the early elementary school years, so you’re in good company if the approach feels counterintuitive. In the preschool years, the kids were as likely to think learning something bit by bit over time was as effective as learning it in a clump. During elementary school, though, the kids started predicting that massed learning would be better at promoting memory than spaced learning.

Maybe the teaching methods employed in so many classrooms give kids (and parents) the impression that repetition, repetition, repetition in one sitting is the way knowledge sticks in memory. Want to learn your spelling words? Write them over and over again in different colored pencils. Want to practice your handwriting? Fill that page with well-formed letters.

Spacing things out may feel inefficient, but it’s more effective, more fun, and a better fit for daily life with young kids. Parents have a natural advantage in teaching more gradually, because we are with kids for hours a day over the course of years. We aren’t under intense time pressure, at least over the long term, removed as we are from the confines of a school day or school year. Nor do we have to find a way to meet the needs of twenty-five kids or more at once.

And keep in mind that the lessons we give needn’t be formal. Teaching young children often looks like talking, playing, and singing. I once ordered a home spelling program that included what felt like 50 million individual magnetic letter color-coded index cards, and scripted teaching procedures. I was so tired from separating and organizing all the materials that I never got around to working through the curriculum with my daughter.

Ultimately, conversation over a few games of prefix bingo one week taught her more about prefixes, suffixes, and units of meaning within words than the elaborate curriculum did. Why? Because that was the method I enjoyed and followed through on — the one that worked within the context of our relationship and our attention spans. She loves board games; I love talking about words. Win-win. The takeaway: do what works for you, and do it a little at a time.

The More Personal the Lesson, the Better

Helping your child learn to read requires making decision after decision. Which letters or words to teach? Which song to sing or story to tell? When making the calls, err on the side of making the lessons themselves personally meaningful for your child. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as teaching the child the letters in their name first, making up songs and stories featuring their pets, or choosing vocabulary words from their favorite books. Sometimes it’s as deep as practicing fluency by reading aloud texts that affirm and sustain a child’s cultural heritage or community.

To help conceptualize this, researchers have defined three levels of personal relevance, from mere association to usefulness to identification. When a reading lesson centers on a passage about the student’s sport of choice (say, soccer), that’s making a personal association. If you can make it clear how the lesson itself is advancing a goal the child is after (like joining wordplay with older siblings), even better. But if you can make the activity resonate with the child’s sense of self, you’re really cooking with grease. This is what’s going on when a little one named Anna sees the letter A and says, That’s my letter! She’s owning it — and identifying with it. It matters to her and she learns it quickly.

The power of personal meaning also helps explain why parents so often find that something that worked like a charm with one child falls flat with another. Kids’ associations, judgments of usefulness, and identities vary widely, even when they grow up under the same roof. Locking in on what makes your individual learner tick and facilitating resonant experiences just for them is golden.

Luckily, you have a built-in feedback mechanism for determining what’s working: your child. Even infants express preferences. A little one might reach for the same book with bold illustrations or lift-up flaps over and over again. You may also find that what gives the lesson meaning is you — your demeanor, your engagement, and your responsiveness can be tremendous motivators.

Praise the Process

You’re voluntarily reading a parenting book, so I’ll venture that you value learning and have confidence that you’ll reap some benefit from the effort you put into acting on the tips compiled here. You believe that you can know more, teach better, and make an impact. And I imagine that you want your child to feel the same sense of self-assurance as they pursue their own challenges.

One way to cultivate that can-do spirit is by cheering on their hard work, focus, and determination by name. Instead of giving generic praise like “You’re so smart,” say specifically what you loved about how they learned — not just the results. For example, if your little one is beginning to write letters: “Great job picking up the pencil and writing. I see you working to hold it in your grasp.” You’ll celebrate their work and lay the motivational track for other efforts to come.

Research by psychologist Carol Dweck and others has found evidence that when parents praise kids’ effort in the learning process — not outcomes — it impacts their kids’ belief that they can improve their ability with effort. With that growth mindset, they are more likely to think they can get smarter if they work at it, a trait that boosts learning and achievement.

In a longitudinal study, Dweck and colleagues traced the whole path of these relations, from parents uttering things like “Good job working hard” when their kids were 1 to 3 years old, to testing those same kids’ academic achievement in late elementary school. They found evidence that this process-related praise predicted a growth mindset in children, which contributed to strong performance in math and reading comprehension later on in fourth grade. The study also found evidence that parents established their praise style (more process-focused, or less so) early on. So learn how to give meaningful compliments. The positive vibes leave lasting impressions.

When in Doubt, Look It Up

This was my dad’s go-to saying when I peppered him with questions as a kid. A good reference guide, in our case a giant Webster’s dictionary that he kept on a wooden stand in his office, was always the first stop for a spelling, definition, or example. His words remain with me, reminding me how important it is to continue learning as we endeavor to teach our kids. My dad didn’t have all the answers and wasn’t afraid to learn alongside me.

When it comes to nurturing and teaching reading, we should stay curious and work to deepen our content knowledge, versus falling back on instructional methods that are more familiar than effective. For example, parents often do things like tell kids to sound out words like right, people, and sign that can’t be, well, sounded out. These words clearly don’t feature direct letter-sound matches, but our default response to any decoding question, phonetic or not, is “sound it out.” The lesson a child needs in those instances isn’t how to blend this letter sound into that one, but how the English language and its writing system work overall.

Similarly, if we decide to teach spelling, we should make it a priority to learn something about word origins and get a handle on conventional letter-sequence patterns. Having a child write a word over and over again is one method, but it’s one you’ll probably feel more comfortable letting go of as you know more about why we spell how we do. When we’re well informed about how written English works and how reading develops, we can take advantage of the countless teachable moments in everyday life.

Maya Payne Smart is a writer, parent educator and literacy advocate who has served on the boards of numerous library and literacy organizations. She and her family live in Milwaukee, where she serves as affiliated faculty in educational policy and leadership in the College of Education at Marquette University. Her website, MayaSmart.com, publishes new book lists, literacy activities, and other free family resources weekly to help parents play their dual roles as first teachers and educational advocates.

Are you a kid — or do you know a kid — who is learning about climate change?

It can be hard to know where to start. So we made a guide about how it’s changing the planet and how to deal with the big feelings you might have when you hear about it. Click here to print a paper version of this comic at home or in your classroom, and here’s more information about how we made this.

Print this comic out at home or in your classroom

Click here to download and print this comic at home. When you print out the PDF file, select your printer’s double-sided option with short-edge binding. Then fold the printed pages in half and organize them according to the page numbers. Feel free to make extra copies to share with your friends or your classmates!

Why we made this

Over the years we’ve created resources for how parents can talk to their kids about climate change. This time we wanted to make something specifically for kids as they’re processing their feelings. We also wanted to create a free resource for parents or teachers to use who are looking for ways to help their kids understand how the planet is changing.

Our methodology

We talked with scientists, psychologists and climate researchers to find the best information and proven practices for how to talk to young kids about climate change. We also interviewed several kids who have experienced climate disasters and have taken action in their local communities.

Who this is for

This comic is intended for kids ages 6-12, who are starting to hear about climate change or are starting to experience climate anxiety. But we hope it can be a resource for people of any age.

Additional resources

Coping with climate change: Advice for kids — from kids

Climate change is here. These 6 tips can help you talk to kids about it

When Kids Ask (Really) Tough Questions: A Quick Guide

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Leo Salvatore graduated from college in May 2022 and dreams of becoming a philosopher. While he applies to graduate school, the affable 23-year-old holds a part-time job that barely existed before the pandemic: online tutor. From his home in Baltimore, Maryland, Salvatore logs in for one of his four-hour shifts three times a week and earns $20.25 an hour. Often, he has two or three students in different grades simultaneously text chatting with him about different homework assignments. It might be a fourth grader in Los Angeles struggling with English, an eighth grader in Palm Beach, Florida, asking about history and a 10th grader in Las Vegas needing help with French verb conjugations.

“It can be overwhelming,” Salvatore said in an interview, describing his life as an online tutor in the time of coronavirus.

A couple of times, Salvatore recalled, he tutored as many as seven students at once. Keeping track of students’ questions and chatting with them in real time can feel more like being a short-order cook during the breakfast rush than an educator. At least his commute to work is great.

Salvatore’s employer is Paper, which is based in Montreal, Canada and says it is the largest online tutoring company in the United States. The company is fueled by more than $120 billion that Uncle Sam has pumped into educational recovery after the pandemic, when students lost months of instruction and fell behind. Schools are required to spend at least 20% of these federal funds on academic catch up programs for students, and the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging schools to use “high dosage tutoring,” which has produced impressive learning gains in rigorous studies where students work closely with an in-person tutor every day using prepared lessons.

Paper has had impressive success marketing its online model of tutoring as a version of high dosage tutoring. Students at schools that pay Paper between $40 and $80 per pupil are entitled to unlimited on-demand tutoring at any hour of the day. More than 300 school districts across the country, serving more than 3 million students, have bought it. Paper has also landed statewide deals with Mississippi, New Mexico and Tennessee, serving millions more students.

The company has hired 3,000 tutors — and says that only 4% of those who apply make the cut. Its tutors all have a college degree or are completing college and have at least a year of experience teaching or tutoring.

“Education and experience aside, what we are looking for in our tutors is their ability to approach our students with warmth, positivity and patience, while being able to adapt to each student’s unique needs,” said Philip Cutler, Paper’s CEO, in an emailed statement.

As Paper has grown, so have its services. In addition to unlimited homework help, its tutors give feedback on essays that students upload. Salvatore is spending most of his time on these lately. The pace is grueling. The company expects him to review an essay of 500 words in 20-25 minutes, and gives him only slightly longer, 35 minutes, for 750 words. During that time, tutors are supposed to not only read but also write a paragraph of overall comments, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, plus make five specific notes per page.

“It’s challenging,” said Salvatore. “We get lots of topics. Sometimes I go from an essay about George Bush’s speech after 9/11, to an essay about Lord of the Flies and Piggy’s demise. So it’s also kind of a brainstorm – in the negative sense.”

Nonetheless, Salvatore says he enjoys the work. Reviewing essays has helped him improve his own writing. “It’s very fulfilling and, I hope, also helpful,” he said.

Salvatore was born in Italy and immigrated to the United States when he was 15 in 2014. He has a flair for languages and worked as a part-time French tutor in college at Soka University of America in Orange County, California. There, he tutored fellow undergraduates the old-fashioned way, in person, in the library.

Then, in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic erupted, Soka sent students home. Salvatore moved in with his mom in Brooklyn, New York. An elementary school teacher, she was suddenly teaching five-year-olds online.

“She was Zooming every day with these little kids in their homes, with some of them with parents behind them, some of them alone,” said Salvatore. “It was a very serious situation. I remember witnessing all that firsthand. It was pretty intense.”

Back on campus during his senior year in January 2022, Salvatore noticed a recruiting ad on LinkedIn for online tutors with Paper. Given his experience as a tutor and the memory of watching his mom struggle with children on Zoom, he was inspired to help and applied. He said he passed a test for job applicants, clicked his way through a short e-learning training module and was directly tutoring students within a month.

The first few weeks were nerve-racking, he said, while he got the hang of keeping students engaged and thinking what to type next in the chat screen. “I remember I was panicking,” he said. “I think the training had been somewhat effective. But when you’re facing the screen in the first couple of sessions, at least for me, all the concepts can flow away.”

Salvatore has deep-set eyes, close shaven hair and a trim dark brown beard. When I interviewed him on Zoom in December 2022, he exuded the inner calm of a yoga instructor. But his students never see his face or hear his voice. On the Paper website where students and tutors connect, there is no video or audio. The only communication is through text chatting and a whiteboard where students and tutors can draw and write numbers.

Paper tutors are trained not to give students the answers, but to use the Socratic method to help students find the answers themselves. When a student shares a homework problem, Salvatore begins by asking what the student already knows. “Do you have any resources that you looked at in class? And from there, I would say, well, let’s look at some examples,” he said.

Direct teaching “from scratch,” he said, is discouraged. But Salvatore is finding that so many students lack basic background knowledge that he sometimes teaches a mini lesson from instructional materials that he discovers online.

By contrast, the kind of high dosage tutoring that’s shown great results in studies includes structured lesson plans. Tutors aren’t making it up on the fly. The same tutor meets with the same student at least three times a week. In the year that Salvatore worked as an online tutor, he says he’s only met with the same student twice a handful of times. Each was by chance.

I was surprised to learn that tutors are frequently handling multiple students at once, even though the service is marketed as one-to-one tutoring. An algorithm matches students with a tutor within 30 seconds, according to the company’s marketing materials, with no scheduling required. Salvatore doesn’t tutor math, for example, so he wouldn’t be matched with a student who has an algebra question. Even if all the tutors are busy, the algorithm will keep adding students who log in to the system into each tutor’s screen. The tutor toggles among them, but all the student sees is a photograph of his or her one tutor, not the other students. Students may have no idea that their tutor is helping others, too.

It’s similar to text chatting with a customer service representative online. You get your individual question answered, but behind the scenes, the representative is chatting with several customers at once. Often customers wait several minutes between questions and replies. That can happen with online tutoring too. I watched one video of a tutoring session, where it seemed to take 30 seconds or more for the tutor to reply to each text that a student typed. I was impatient just watching it.

Students can log in any time of day, but tutors aren’t expected to be on call at all hours. Tutors submit their availability to Paper and an algorithm determines the schedule, based on expected student demand. Salvatore has never requested a 3 a.m. graveyard shift. “No, I like my sleep schedule,” he said.

The research critique of this kind of 24/7 online tutoring is that very few students are motivated to take advantage of it. Fewer than 30% of students even tried it once in one study and students who used it regularly, as recommended, were rare. Researchers say it’s not reaching the students who need tutoring the most; the students at risk of failing were the least likely to try it.

Salvatore is just one of 3,000 online tutors employed by Paper. Others may have different experiences. But dozens of tutors describe similar stories on a Reddit discussion board, complaining about time constraints and low pay. (Starting wages were recently increased to $18 an hour.) Some disgruntled tutors describe a sweatshop-like atmosphere where tutors quickly burn out and are fired.

Salvatore is not disgruntled, but his experience shows the pressures that online tutors are operating under, and make it seem unlikely that quick homework help like this can effectively help students fill large holes of instruction that they missed.

Not all online tutoring companies are the same. Some like Paper focus on drop-in homework help, but others make an effort to replicate an in-person tutoring experience over video with certified teachers or specially trained tutors in frequent, scheduled sessions. That model is far more expensive to deliver, and I plan to continue writing about the experiences of these kinds of tutors too.

Salvatore is also interested in exploring other types of tutoring. He misses the camaraderie that developed when he was an in-person tutor. “The more I did it,” he said, “the more I realized that it was a very, very meaningful way to help people, with their academics, but also to connect with them and have a conversation and make learning a bit more informal and fun.”

This story about an online tutor was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Educators who invest in project-based learning (PBL) say the benefits are obvious: real-world relevance and a sense of purpose lead to higher classroom engagement and better knowledge retention among students. But the path to those outcomes isn’t always smooth. Students sometimes resist the more active role PBL requires from them, because they are accustomed to sit-and-get instruction.

“That’s how we train kids to do school,” said Bob Lenz, the CEO of PBLWorks, a nonprofit that helps educators build capacity to design and teach quality PBL. “You tell me what I need to know. I’ll tell you what I know. You’ll give me a grade and we’re done.” Instead of capturing what students know about a particular subject at a point in time like a traditional test or quiz, PBL encourages students to iterate and repeatedly evaluate their understanding. 

Because it explores real-world issues without clear-cut solutions, PBL might involve public speaking, working in teams or sharing projects in an exhibition, all of which can cause anxiety in students. Additionally, projects require more responsibility and investment, so when they go awry, it can lead to doubts that result in low confidence, negative thoughts and low engagement, according to University of Illinois researchers Carolyn Orson and Reed Larson in their article,  “Helping Teens Overcome Anxiety Episodes in Project Work: The Power of Reframing.” Teens are especially susceptible to high levels of anxiety. A recent survey from Pew Research Center showed 70% of teens ages thirteen to seventeen think anxiety and depression is a major problem among their peers. 

But not all anxious feelings are harmful to learning. In small doses, anxiety can be fruitful, according to researchers and psychologists. Lenz has seen this play out in classrooms that PBLWorks supports. “When it [works out] and you have the exhibition and you share it and everybody claps, you never forget that as a learner,” Lenz said. “If you want to build somebody’s self-esteem, support them in doing something that causes them anxiety.” 

Orson and Larson’s research includes three reframing strategies teachers can use to help students step back from their feelings of anxiety when they experience challenges in their project work.

Discomfort or Disorder? 

Getting butterflies before a big presentation or feeling jittery when starting a new project are common responses to events that seem challenging. How does a teacher or parent know when a child’s anxiety is normal vs. when it’s cause for concern?

“I talk about school as being something that is okay to get a little nervous about because it is important. We want you to care enough to study,” said Jennifer Louie, clinical psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute. “But we want you to keep it all in perspective and say to yourself, ‘Is my anxiety level appropriate to the situation? Is my body reacting as if I’m being chased by a lion when I only have a test?”

A misconception about children’s anxiety is that parents and teachers have to completely accommodate it. “Too much giving in to anxiety actually makes things worse,” said Louie. Teachers and parents can look for signs that anxiety is severe, like disruptions to eating and sleeping or excessive crying, and then make accommodations as necessary. But the accommodations should be temporary. 

“We don’t want it to be that way for the long term. We want them to always be working towards challenging themselves,” said Louie. For example, if a student is really nervous about a class presentation they might be allowed to record and submit a video of the presentation. The next time, the student can give the presentation to just the teacher, and eventually they can work up to presenting to the full class.

Reframe Students’ Understanding of Their Abilities 

Orson and Larson, the University of Illinois researchers, interviewed 27 educators to understand their strategies for helping learners with anxiety related to PBL. One of the educators, identified in their study as Cathy, was working with middle school students on a play when she found a student who had been cast as the lead character crying in the bathroom. Even though they had been practicing for weeks, the student, named Katara, didn’t think she was good enough for such a big role. 

Ability-related anxiety usually crops up when students are trying something new, write Orson and Larson. A telltale sign that a student is experiencing this type of stress is a drop in confidence and an increase in negative self-talk. Teachers can help students by reminding them of times they tried something new and succeeded. Teachers might say, “I’ve seen you do this” or “I’ve seen your abilities” when assuring students that they are equipped to take on a challenge, Orson told MindShift.

Cathy, for example, helped Katara think about her skills in new ways by reminding her how much she had rehearsed and prepared for her role in the play. To quiet Katara’s self-deprecating inner voice, Cathy provided her outside perspective, including examples of how Katara excelled in the role and why she was chosen to play the part. 

Additionally, teachers can help students who are anxious about PBL understand that they can learn new skills from the challenges that they’re experiencing. For instance, if a student is trying something that consistently fails, teachers can use Carol Dweck’s growth mindset framework to convince them that they’re on the way to learning something new. To avoid misusing the growth mindset framework and praising effort solely to make kids feel good when they are not successful, teachers can direct praise towards students’ effective learning strategies.

Reframe Students’ Understanding of the Challenges

Orson and Larson’s research highlights another reframing strategy used by Desiree, an educator in Illinois. During a mural project, Desiree’s student, Delphi, was using spray paint for the first time and struggling to paint eyes on a person in the mural. After multiple attempts, she became frustrated and anxious. 

As students are first starting project-based learning, they usually don’t anticipate possible obstacles, write Orson and Larson. When students come up against a roadblock, educators can give them more information about the materials or scope of the project to help them understand what is and isn’t in their control. “They’re not saying, ‘We’re going to make this easier,’” Orson told MindShift. “It’s more like they’re [giving students] another perspective on the challenge.”

For example, Desiree helped her student understand that spray paint works differently from more familiar art-making tools and that it may not look the way she expects it to. She told Delphi to take a step back from her work to see it how murals are meant to be seen – from a distance. With a new perspective on challenges, students are able to adjust their expectations and the work seems more manageable.

Reframe Students’ Experience of Their Emotions

Research shows that emotions – even ones that are considered negative like guilt, anger, or anxiety – are a useful feedback mechanism. “Emotions are so intertwined with learning at every step of the way from why you decided to try to engage with something all the way to actually finishing something,” Orson said. “Emotions can help alert you to information that helps you understand your world a little more.”

Orson and Larson interviewed Vivian, an educator for a robotics youth program, about how she addressed student anxiety as her class built catapults. Vivian’s student Mateo became so frustrated when his catapult initially didn’t work that he stopped trying altogether. Instead of getting mad at her student for wasting time, Vivian prompted him to talk through his frustrations with his catapult and focus on the specifics of the situation causing him to feel that way.

Vivian normalized his emotions, saying it’s okay to feel frustrated when trying to solve a hard problem. She also helped Mateo see that his emotions are not a reason to check out but that they could help him identify where he could start problem-solving.

Reframing emotions is useful when students hit an unforeseen obstacle, like if one of their project partners is absent or an expert they were hoping to talk to suddenly cancels. They learn that working through surprises is part of the process. As students do more project-based work and are supported through their challenges, they’ll learn to reframe emotions on their own.

Improve the Conditions for Project-based Learning

Teachers can put structures in place that make overwhelming anxiety less likely. “The fear of being judged is a huge adolescent fear,” said Orson, who recommended that teachers plan relationship-building exercises throughout the year to maintain a positive social environment in the classroom. “Fostering a really supportive interpersonal environment where it’s okay to not know and it’s okay to ask questions and to make mistakes is really important.” 

When students are new to PBL, teachers also can limit the scope of projects to allow for the  unexpected. “Some students are going to struggle, so you’re going to slow down. Or their first projects are just not ready, so you’ll have to help them revise,” said Bob Lenz from PBLWorks. “It’s better to do small projects that are successful than large ones that you don’t finish.”

Teachers can reduce assessment-related anxiety by setting clear expectations and providing a rubric for what makes a quality project. “Sometimes that criteria can be generated by the students,” said Lenz. “Sometimes it’s influenced by an expert.” For example, if the class is creating public service announcements, they might have a commercial director talk to them about what goes into a good product. 

When projects are finished, teachers can leave time for students to reflect. Lenz suggested questions like “What was your process for completing this project?” and “What would you do differently next time?” Opportunities to reflect individually and with others helps students understand themselves better as learners and monitor their growth.

Moving past anxiety and creating a finished project invites students to practice valuable skills. Schools aspire to develop students into problem-solvers, critical thinkers, active communicators and kind collaborators. It’s a tall order, but when done correctly, PBL and the challenging emotions that come with stepping outside one’s comfort zone can provide the opportunity to develop those qualities.

TM ® & © Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved. Unearthing Joy © 2023 by Gholdy Muhammad. Published by Scholastic Inc.

Defining the world as curriculum means we must move about and navigate the world, and see it as full of opportunities for teaching and learning. Often, I ask teachers to take a walk across any landscape and describe what they see. How can the people, places, lands, objects, animals, and things around them become ideas for teaching and learning? For example, if you were to see a beautiful historic tree with striking buttress roots pushing up from the ground and interweaving with the soil and the trunk, what ideas for teaching and learning might come to mind?

I ask teachers and other developers of curriculum:

• What music and other sounds, paintings, and other visuals, digital creations, and so on do you see and feel? (Art)
• What language, writing, and metaphors do you see and feel? (English Language Arts)
• What examples of fitness and wellness do you see and feel? (Health and Physical Education)
• What representations of numbers, quantities, and space do you see and feel? (Mathematics)
• What branches of knowledge and discovery do you see and feel? (Science)
• What histories and contemporary realities do you see and feel? (Social Studies)

Their responses become ideas to bring into the classroom. My goal is to cultivate curriculum fluency among teachers, meaning the ability to look at anything around them quickly and develop curriculum from it. Just as I want children to develop reading fluency, I want teachers to develop curriculum fluency to come up with ideas expeditiously and with excellence.

Curriculum as Stories and Storytelling

Curriculum defined as stories and storytelling relates to the worthwhile narratives of humanity. Reading, telling, and listening to diverse stories are key to learning in school. We must ask whose stories have been told and taught (and from whose perspectives) and whose stories have not. Stories have a special quality of helping children to (re)member. They can be both real and imagined, and joy is connected to both types. As a reading specialist, I often give diagnostic assessments and find that students typically score higher on comprehension measures when they read narrative passages or texts, compared to informational passages or texts. That may be partly due to the power of stories to linger in our short-term and long-term memories. Stories provide a context for and connection to human lives.

I define curriculum as stories and storytelling because of their richness. I am not just referring to traditional literary themes and elements, such as characterization and plot, but the nuances, reflections, meanings, life lessons, and life connections to stories. Curriculum as stories and storytelling helps us to apply skills and standards to daily life. Importantly, artists across time have been creating and teaching through stories. For example, in Stevie Wonder’s 1976 album, Songs in the Key of Life, each track tells a story. When I listen to it, I wonder, What would curriculum in the key of life look and feel like for a child and teacher?

The reason educational leaders police curriculum and create policies around anti-Blackness and anti-critical race theory is because they seek to control stories in the hearts and minds of children. Consequently, as they grow older, those children are likely to teach the same false, incomplete, or harmful narratives to their children. In this way, curriculum is generational. I wonder how those leaders must feel about themselves restraining complete, justice-centered stories in schools. I ask teachers and curriculum developers, Which stories do schools consider worthwhile? What criteria were used to select those stories? How do the stories we teach elevate students’ HILL (histories, identities, literacies, and liberation)?

Curriculum as Legacy and Legacy Building

Curriculum defined as legacy and legacy building means that what we teach and how we teach it must leave an imprint on the lives of our students. It should feel special and enduring. Such curriculum should encourage and enable students to feel, and act toward improving the self and the world. What is being taught and learned should be significant, meaningful, and unique to our communities. Curriculum as legacy and legacy building should leave a stamp on our culture—and lead to a record of our times. Every time I develop a lesson, unit plan, or learning experience, I try to build in the legacies of the ancestors—this is what the five pursuits enable. I ask teachers and curriculum developers: What legacies do you wish to create? What do you want to be known for? What imprints and trajectories do you want to make?

These ways of (re)defining and (re)conceptualizing curriculum are dynamic and push boundaries of imaginings of who our students can become. Curriculum must not only connect to the world, but must also disrupt hurt, harm, and pain in the world. So, it’s important to ask yourself, does my current curriculum:

• implicitly or explicitly contribute to others’ hurt, harm, or pain?
• silence others’ hurt, harm, or pain?
• actively disrupt others’ hurt, harm, or pain, and bring joy?

We must question curriculum and the great impact it can have. Of course, curriculum should always connect to justice, equity, anti-racism, and other anti-oppressions, and the ultimate goal of curriculum should be joy.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language & Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her scholarship has appeared in leading educational journals and books. Dr. Muhammad was named among the top 2022 education scholars of public influence in Education Week’s “Rick Hess Straight Up” blog rankings. She is the author of the best-selling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (Scholastic).

Worries about social media’s effect on hardwired kids are coming from all corners.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday urged Congress to hold Big Tech accountable for dangerous content shared on social media, and increase privacy protections specifically for children.

“Millions of young people are struggling with bullying, violence, trauma and mental health. We must hold social-media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit,” Biden wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

State prosecutors are investigating social media’s impact on kids. Congress has called hearings on the topic. And schools are ringing alarm bells too.

Seattle Public Schools on Friday filed a 91-page lawsuit against the companies behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube in a federal district court.

The public school district alleges that students are being recommended harmful content online, exacerbating a mental health crisis, and social media companies are allowing it to happen.

Here’s what you need to know about the lawsuit.

The school system accuses social media platforms of increasing students’ anxiety and depression

Seattle Public Schools alleges that the very design of these platforms, which seek to maximize the amount of time users spend on them, is flawed and dangerous–particularly to kids.

They argue that the longer people stay on social media, the more ads those companies sell and thus the more money they stand to make. And some features, such as push notifications, are designed to draw users in, making it hard to ignore, especially for kids, the school district alleges.

It also references studies that suggest teens who spend a lot of time using screens are more likely to receive diagnoses of depression or anxiety, encounter cyber bullying and not get enough sleep.

According to the lawsuit, social media companies have “exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse.”

The lawsuit cites a 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal, in which several teenage girls reported developing eating disorders or relapsing after TikTok promoted extreme diet videos to them.

The issue of potentially dangerous content on social media is not a new one.

As NPR reported in 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager, testified before Congress, saying that executives hid research about the risks the company’s products posed to kids.

Since then, Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, has ramped up safety features for teens, including efforts to prevent unwanted contact from adults, tools that let parents limit the amount of time their children spend on Instagram and age-verification technology.

“We want teens to be safe online,” Meta Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis told NPR in an email. “We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.”

She did not comment directly on the Seattle public schools’ lawsuit.

Jose Castenada, a Google spokesperson, said that the company, which owns YouTube, has “introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well being.” He also did not comment directly on the lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Snap and a spokesperson for TikTok said they could not comment on litigation but that users’ wellbeing is a priority.

The school system says it doesn’t have the resources to manage a crisis made worse by social media

In the lawsuit, Seattle Public Schools says the number of students who report feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities” increased by 30% from 2009, when smartphones gained steam, to 2019, by which time they’d become ubiquitous.

“Our students – and young people everywhere – face unprecedented learning and life struggles that are amplified by the negative impacts of increased screen time, unfiltered content, and potentially addictive properties of social media,” said Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Brent Jones in a statement.

But the school system says it doesn’t have enough staff to treat the growing number of students seeking mental-health counseling.

“Our obligation is to create the conditions for students to thrive and have high quality learning experiences,” said Jones. “The harm caused by these companies runs counter to that.”

Nationwide, just over half of all public school systems say they can effectively provide mental health services to students in need according to the National Center of Education.

The Seattle-based law firm Keller Rohrback is representing the school district in the lawsuit on a contingency basis, which means attorneys will not get paid unless they win and companies are required to pay a fine, according to Tim Robinson, the head of media relations for Seattle Public Schools.

Tech companies have a powerful legal shield, but it’s about to be challenged

It’s nearly impossible to sue social media companies over the content on their platforms because of a law known as Section 230. Part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, it says tech companies can’t be held liable for what others share on their sites.

But that could soon change.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in a case that aims to limit Section 230 and puts social media companies’ recommendation algorithms front and center. Those recommendation formulas are at the heart of the Seattle Public Schools’ lawsuit too.

Right now, the public school system has a very steep legal road to climb, according to Ryan Calo, a professor at University of Washington’s School of Law. But if the plaintiffs in the case before the Supreme Court are successful, it could open the door to this kind of argument, he said.

Calo is not involved in either lawsuit, but he does have two children in Seattle Public Schools, one in 7th grade and the other in 3rd. He said isn’t surprised that this is happening in Seattle, the home of tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft, which has always been at the forefront of the internet and the digital world.

Even if the case never gets its day in court, its filing allows the school district to draw attention to the issue, Calo said.

“They can do so as a pretty compelling and sympathetic plaintiff in the form of a school district that cares about its kids.”

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (en español: 888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Excerpted from “Identity Affirming Classrooms: Spaces that Center Humanity” by Erica Buchanan-Rivera. Published by Routledge.

Decolonize Your Mind and Classroom

A third-grade teacher attempted to take a brown crayon out of my hand and exchange it for a peach color after she noticed my depiction of Jesus as a Black man—yes, a lot of Crayola curriculum back in those days. Little did the teacher know, my house was full of Black Jesus (and Santa too) as my mom collected figurines, and I was also intelligent enough at the age of nine to know that a dark pigment (despite all the pale, fair-skinned images of Jesus in school) would be evident in a biblical story that took place near the equator. Yet, this teacher was passionate about “correcting me” and set a standard for my work due to her social construction. She deliberately overlaid her adopted norms over my reality.

The emotions and practices we bring into the classroom are a product of our experiences. Due to the nature of living in an unjust world that upholds forms of oppression within every system, many of us have been socialized to adopt norms while existing in spaces under the confines of whiteness. Many of the systems, policies, and procedures developed by humans in positions of power reflect the ways they have been conditioned to see and live in the world. Therefore, we must interrogate the dominant ideologies and how whiteness influences the spaces we design for children. Teachers also hold power over the decisions made in the classroom. We can determine the content and supplemental materials that need to be taught, and co-construct learning experiences with students. We can honor the native languages, culture, and racial experiences of students within the classroom, having critical conversations about social justice. We can help students to see that there are different methods to showing proficiency. To hold power means that we also have to engage in a practice of ideological unlearning.

One of my most powerful teachable moments occurred during my first year of teaching. While administering a math journal problem to a group of kindergarten students, I was approached by a student who was eager to show me her results. The problem read as followed:

Miss Buchanan only has four chairs in her home. She invited Sydnee, Ashton, Arius, and Jacob over for a snack. Will there be enough chairs for everyone, including Miss Buchanan, to sit down and enjoy the snack?

Sydnee solved the problem and shared that there would be enough seats for everyone. Immediately, this innate non-negotiable feeling emerged, and I advised that she may need to rethink her problem and try it again. The student continued to share that she was confident in her response and came up with a solution. I proceeded to demonstrate multiple strategies that matched my thinking. And again, Sydnee conveyed that there were enough seats because she figured out a way to make things work. Baffled by her reasoning, I took the time to meticulously look at her illustration as all students were required to demonstrate their problem-solving methods. In a combination of lowercase and capital letters she wrote, “Jacob cAnt coM.” Then, Sydnee proceeded to explain that she uninvited a student due to the lack of chairs available so we could all have a place to sit. 

Her math journal taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of decolonizing my mind. I started to question: How often do I expect students to fit their thinking into a box that I created? How did I create this box? Why do I hold the notion that things need to be executed in a certain way to meet standards? Where did these standards originate from? How are these standards harming the creativity and brilliance of the students I’m serving, particularly those at the margins? While attempting to have Sydnee match my reasoning, I had failed to match her thinking process and see the possibilities beyond the way I conceptualized the problem.

Decolonizing our minds is a process of unlearning where we deconstruct the ideologies and binaries that other individuals, repress cultures, or deem people as inadequate due to the categorical, socially constructed hierarchies embedded in thinking—sometimes, without even knowing. The advancement of educational equity is a combination of mirror work and systems work where we collectively assess and challenge the power structures that yield unequal outcomes. We must understand the role we play in maintaining inequities. When you think of success, how do you define it and are those views tied to your expectations of students? (Kawi, 2020). In Hahnville High School in Boutte, Louisiana (Page, 2021) a student was prohibited from graduating due to the style of shoes he was wearing (which led to a teacher providing the student his own shoes). How were those standards for a dress code determined? A policy that would cost a significant milestone and accomplishment for a student? Considering the subjective nature of disciplinary offenses such as disruption and insubordination, how are we decolonizing our minds when working with human behaviors? The decolonization process starts with us (mirror work), and then we work to develop content with essential identity questions in a physical environment that is designed to value the identity of students.

Erica Buchanan-Rivera, Ph.D., is an educational equity scholar, consultant, community organizer, and fierce advocate for children and liberatory spaces where people can be their authentic selves. She has served as a teacher, principal, director of curriculum, and adjunct professor. She is currently the Director of Equity and Inclusion in a K-12 public school district in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Warning labels on LGBTQ-themed books in Florida. Challenges to books related to race, sexuality or gender identity in Ohio, Missouri, Virginia and Pennsylvania. A Texas principal placed on leave after accusations of promoting critical race theory. Across the U.S., the topics kids can learn and read about in school have been hotly contested in recent years. Mostly, these controversies have been driven by adults. That’s the way education decisions education are usually made, even in less contentious times, according to school librarian and language arts teacher Julia Torres. “We have a lot of conversations about kids. We will involve them in performative ways, but I have only known of a few organizations that really authentically involve young people at every level of decision-making,” she said. 

Torres makes a call to action for school librarians to center student voices in programming and collection management in the book “Liven Up Your Library: Design Engaging and Inclusive Programs for Tweens and Teens,” co-authored by Valerie Tagoe. “[W]e cannot claim to serve young people while excluding them from conversations and decision-making about resources and materials that are primarily for their use. We must always prioritize and protect student empowerment as a key right and responsibility when working with young people,” the two educators write.

In her school, Torres starts the year by conducting a “reading habits and interest survey” among her students. She may be driving toward the same standards with from year to year, but she uses what she learns from the surveys and regular check-ins to chart each group’s path. “When you don’t include them and it feels more like you’re doing education to them, that’s how you get a lot of apathetic students, and it’s a lot harder for things to meet the ends that you’re trying to achieve,” she said.

Torres and Tagoe encourage librarians to build community around students’ reading interests. It just takes listening. For example, Tagoe sponsored a graphic novel club at students’ request. She also invited the Japan America Society to present about Japanese high school life after seeing her students’ passion for manga. The presenter also led a tea ceremony. “So the kids took off their shoes, sat in a circle, made matcha tea, and … they soaked it all up,” Tagoe said. “Just giving them experiences to provide context (to what they’re reading) so that they can learn about different cultures and language and people — I think that’s a powerful tool.”

Listening and observation also guides Tagoe’s collection development choices. “You have to look at the curricular needs of the students and your requests, what they’re looking at, what they’re checking out,” she said. “Especially in high school, I’ve always tried to kind of move based on what the students are telling me.”

Not everyone grasps the value of student-centered librarianship. Torres recalled a time when an administrator questioned why her students weren’t completing worksheets along with their independent reading. She sees hypocrisy in some adults’ views about students, reading and productivity. “Many adults do not make time for the things that they’re expecting the young people to do. And they think that just because they graduated, they have degrees, what have you, they no longer need to do a lot of the things that these young people need to do, which is adultism,” she said.

To help students develop life-long literacy, Torres said educators should be realistic that a reading life has peaks and valleys. While in graduate school, for example, she gravitated toward lighter fare, such as poetry and podcasts, for a break from heavy academic texts. She and Tagoe recommend normalizing those experiences with students. They also said they work to counter messages that teenagers have absorbed from adults about their reading preferences, such as the idea that graphic novels or audio books aren’t “real” reading.

Torres and Tagoe also aim to increase young people’s awareness of their place in a bigger picture. When a student has a great idea, for example, Torres said she encourages them to research who’s done it first. That can lead students to new information and ideas they can build on or respond to, including past achievements and historical injustices.

In their book, Torres and Tagoe write, “Students should absolutely be encouraged to contribute their individual voices and experiences to that of a collective student body, but also understand that their stories and experiences are part of a continuum of voices and stories that existed before them and will continue long after they have graduated or moved on.”

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that’s sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia.

Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can “quickly and efficiently” decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

His motivation to create the bot was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism. Since the release of ChatGPT in late November, there have been reports of students using the breakthrough language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own.

“there’s so much chatgpt hype going around. is this and that written by AI? we as humans deserve to know!” Tian wrote in a tweet introducing GPTZero.

Tian said many teachers have reached out to him after he released his bot online on Jan. 2, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.

More than 30,000 people had tried out GPTZero within a week of its launch. It was so popular that the app crashed. Streamlit, the free platform that hosts GPTZero, has since stepped in to support Tian with more memory and resources to handle the web traffic.

How GPTZero works

To determine whether an excerpt is written by a bot, GPTZero uses two indicators: “perplexity” and “burstiness.” Perplexity measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is perplexed by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to the bot — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated.

Separately, burstiness compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the app’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a LinkedIn post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing by a human versus AI.

Tian acknowledged that his bot isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.

But by designing an app that sheds some light on what separates human from AI, the tool helps work toward a core mission for Tian: bringing transparency to AI.

“For so long, AI has been a black box where we really don’t know what’s going on inside,” he said. “And with GPTZero, I wanted to start pushing back and fighting against that.”

The quest to curb AI plagiarism

The college senior isn’t alone in the race to rein in AI plagiarism and forgery. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has signaled a commitment to preventing AI plagiarism and other nefarious applications. Last month, Scott Aaronson, a researcher currently focusing on AI safety at OpenAI, revealed that the company has been working on a way to “watermark” GPT-generated text with an “unnoticeable secret signal” to identify its source.

The open-source AI community Hugging Face has put out a tool to detect whether text was created by GPT-2, an earlier version of the AI model used to make ChatGPT. A philosophy professor in South Carolina who happened to know about the tool said he used it to catch a student submitting AI-written work.

The New York City education department said on Thursday that it’s blocking access to ChatGPT on school networks and devices over concerns about its “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT.

GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have safeguards.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

For the past 25 years, U.S. policy has urged schools to keep students with disabilities in the same classrooms with their general education peers unless severe disabilities prevent it. It seems a humane policy not to wall off those with disabilities and keep them apart from society. Who would argue against it?

Schools have embraced inclusion. According to the most recent data from 2020-21 school year, two thirds of the 7 million students with disabilities who receive special education services spent 80 percent or more of their time in traditional classrooms. Separation is less common today; only one out of every eight students with disabilities was taught separately in a special-needs only environment most of the time.

But a recent international analysis of all the available research on special education inclusion found inconsistent results. Some children thrived while others did very badly in regular classrooms. Overall, students didn’t benefit academically, psychologically or socially from the practice. Math and reading scores, along with psychosocial measures, were no higher for children with disabilities who learned in general education classrooms, on average, compared to children who learned in separate special education classrooms.

“I was surprised,” said Nina Dalgaard, lead author of the inclusion study for the Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that reviews research evidence for public policy purposes. “Despite a rather large evidence base, it doesn’t appear that inclusion automatically has positive effects. To the contrary, for some children, it appears that being taught in a segregated setting is actually beneficial.”

Many disability advocates balked at the findings, published in December 2022, on social media. An influential lobbying organization, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said it continues to believe that inclusion is beneficial for students and that this study will “not change” how the disability community advocates for students.

“Students with disabilities have a right to learn alongside their peers, and studies have shown that this is beneficial not only for students with disabilities but also for other students in the classroom,” said Lindsay Lubatzky, the organization’s director of policy and advocacy.

“Every student is different, and ‘inclusion’ for one student may look different from others. For some, it could be a classroom separate from their peers, but that is rarely the case.”

The Campbell Collaboration study is a meta-analysis, which means it is supposed to sweep up all the best research on a topic and use statistics to tell us where the preponderance of the evidence lies. Dalgaard, a senior researcher at VIVE—The Danish Centre for Social Science Research, initially found over 2,000 studies on special education inclusion. But she threw out 99 percent of them, many of which were quite favorable to inclusion. Most were qualitative studies that described students’ experiences in an inclusion classroom but didn’t rigorously track academic progress. Among those that did monitor math or reading, many of them simply noted how much students improved in an inclusive setting, but didn’t compare those gains with how students might have otherwise fared in a separate special-needs only setting.

Fewer than 100 studies had comparison groups, but still most of those didn’t make the cut because the students in inclusive settings were vastly different from those in separate settings. Special education is a particularly difficult area to study because researchers cannot randomly assign students with disabilities to different treatments. Schools tend to keep children with milder disabilities in a regular classroom and teach only those with the most severe disabilities separately. In comparing how both groups fare, it should be no surprise that students with milder disabilities outperform those with more severe disabilities. But that’s not good evidence that inclusion is better. “It’s a serious, confounding bias,” Dalgaard said.

In the end, Dalgaard was left with only 15 studies where the severity of the disability was somehow noted so that she could compare apples to apples. These 15 studies covered more than 7,000 students, ages six through 16, across nine countries. Four of the studies were conducted in the United States with the others in Europe.

The disabilities in the studies ranged widely, from the most common ones, such as dyslexia, ADHD, speech impairments and autism, to rarer ones, such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. Some students had mild versions; others had more severe forms. I asked Dalgaard if she found clues in the results as to which disabilities were more conducive to inclusion. I was curious if children with severe dyslexia, for example, might benefit from separate instruction with specially trained reading teachers for the first couple of years after diagnosis.

Dalgaard said there wasn’t enough statistical evidence to untangle when inclusion is most beneficial. But she did notice in the underlying studies that students with autism seem to be better off in a separate setting. For example, their psychosocial scores were higher. But more studies would be needed to confirm this.

She also noticed that how a school goes about including students with disabilities mattered. In schools that used a co-teaching model, one regular teacher and one trained in special education, students fared better in inclusion classrooms. Again, more research is needed to confirm this statistically. And, even if co-teaching proves to be effective over multiple studies, not every school can afford to hire two teachers for every classroom. It’s particularly cost-prohibitive in middle and high school as teachers specialize in subjects.

Instead, Dalgaard noted that inclusion is often a cost-cutting practice because schools save money when they no longer run separate classrooms or schools for children with disabilities. “In some cases, children with disabilities no longer had access to the same resources. It’s not supposed to happen this way, but it does in some places,” said Dalgaard. “That is probably why the results of the meta-analysis show that some children actually learn more in segregated settings.”

I was surprised to learn from Dalgaard that no sound meta-analysis has found “clear” benefits for special education inclusion. Indeed, previous meta-analyses have found exactly the same inconsistent or very small positive results, she said. This latest Campbell Collaboration study was commissioned to see if newer research, published from 2000 to September 2021, would move the dial. It did not.

As a nation, we spend an estimated $90 billion a year in federal, state and local taxpayer funds on educating children with disabilities. We ought to know more about how to best help them learn.

This story about special education inclusion was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

When and how people receive puberty education varies greatly. Some are taught according to thorough curricula; others spend hours searching for answers to their questions online.

Short Wave co-host Emily Kwong is in the first category. When 10-year-old Emily first learned about periods, she asked her mom for diagrams and procedures — because information is comforting. On the other hand, when 10-year old Short Wave producer Margaret Cirino first learned about periods, she was confused and a little scared.

Fast forward a decade or so … and there is a lot that adult Emily and adult Marge still don’t know about their periods!

That’s why today Emily and Marge team up to provide a new and improved period talk. They chat with Kristyn Brandi, an OB/GYN and family planning doctor, and Mandi Tembo, a menstrual health PhD candidate, about everything they wish they knew about their periods. Consider this episode a period manual, complete with an overview of the menstrual cycle, the science of how periods work, how to know when something is abnormal — and whether to have a period in the first place.

Check out our episode on period tracking apps and data privacy here.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

This episode was reported and produced by Margaret Cirino. It was edited by Gisele Grayson and Rebecca Ramirez. Brit Hanson checked the facts. The audio engineer was Alex Drewenskus.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Excerpted from “Liven Up Your Library: Design Engaging and Inclusive Programs for Tweens and Teens” by Julia Torres and Valerie Tagoe. Published by ISTE.

A Space for Building Community

When we think about the school library as a place where reading communities begin and are nurtured, we have to remember that a school is a place where many students do not inherently feel welcome. Historically speaking, school systems have been an instrumental part of systems of colonization and indoctrination. In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s famous essay “Decolonising the Mind” (1986), we learn that students have been socialized to shame one another for speaking Kikuyu, their mother tongue. The tendency to demonize the unique parts of us that make us individuals, and to praise or reward the parts of people that demonstrate their assimilation with the dominant culture is pervasive throughout all of humankind. From Japan, which kept its borders closed to visitors from the West (until the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853), all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, whose indigenous population was decimated with the arrival of colonizers and smallpox in 1778, education has been used to dominate and subjugate throughout human history.

So what can we do to transform our educational system from one of subjugation and assimilation to one where everyone is truly welcome, a system based upon precepts of liberation and freedom?

Culturally Relevant Librarianship

The idea of culturally relevant librarianship is a natural outgrowth of culturally responsive education. Many have written and taught about culturally relevant pedagogy, or CRP (not to be confused with CRT) and it is the child of what began as multicultural education. When we think about culturally relevant librarianship, we have to consider that librarianship is in essence the curation, preservation, and dissemination of information and story. We must also remember that historically, information and stories have been the record of those who considered themselves to be the winners, the conquerors in societies the world over.

In modern times, what we call CRP was coined by Gloria Ladson-Billings as a way in which we remain responsive to and aware of the need of all children to have an experience (in library and classroom environments) that is empowering, restorative, and validating.

As you begin to explore culturally responsive librarianship, begin by asking yourself the following:

• How do we make sure students feel empowered? We lift up stories and information that depict all people, not just those of the global majority, as inventors, explorers, discoverers, and victors.
• How do we make sure students are restored through the information they seek and find? We make sure information seeking is a collaborative process and one that includes search terms, keywords, and databases that center around people and funds of knowledge outside those of Western Europe.
• How do we validate students in an effort to make sure they truly feel welcome in library space? We center their funds of knowledge and make sure they know their stories are valued and valid, even if those from the dominant culture do not understand the cultural norms, language, and value depicted within them.

Developing Cultural Competency

Understanding and undertaking this work is a process. According to Monteil-Overall and Reyes-Escudero (2015, p. 24), a continuum of cultural competency exists, from cultural incapacity to cultural proficiency:

• Cultural incapacity. Failure to understand why a person would need to understand anyone else’s culture.
• Cultural blindness. Individuals claim not to see differences between individuals and feel it is inappropriate to discuss differences.
• Cultural awareness. Individuals candidly recognize differences and have some knowledge of what makes individuals ethnically, racially, linguistically, culturally, or in other ways unique.
• Cultural competence. Individuals who adapt their practice to meet the needs of those around them.
• Cultural proficiency. Individuals with the capacity to understand social justice issues and who work to eliminate inequities faced by cultural groups. (Adapted from Mardis & Oberg, 2019.)

In order to support people of any age moving along the continuum, it is important to seek tools that facilitate conversation, to read and study them, and to do the internal work of interrogating our own biases and how they have been formed. For example:

• Librarians curating collections can look to socialjusticebooks.org for examples of book lists or readers’ advisory suggestions that align with specific cultural/ethnic/racial groups.
• Librarians looking to develop their understanding of how library classification systems may be exclusionary or biased may read this Smithsonian article.
• Librarians looking to depart from the Western methods of library classification may choose to organize library materials with an indigenous system of knowledge classification, like this example from the University of British Columbia.
• Many librarians have chosen to genrefy their libraries in an attempt to emulate the organization systems used by bookstores. Genrefication is a step toward student empowerment and away from dependence. Learn more from this article in American Libraries magazine.

Julia E. Torres is a language arts teacher and librarian in Denver, Colorado. An advocate for all students and public education, Torres is a frequent conference and event speaker, and facilitates workshops and professional conversations about equity, anti-bias/anti-racist education, culturally sustaining pedagogies and literacy in the digital age. She is a current member of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award Committee, a 2020 Library Journal Mover and Shaker and a past president of the Colorado Language Arts Society (a regional affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English). She holds a master’s of education in secondary education curriculum and instruction from University of Phoenix, a master’s in creative writing from Regis University and a masters in library and information science from the University of Denver.

Valerie Tagoe is a high school librarian in Texas. She’s a winner of the S. Janice Kee Award from Texas Woman’s University, and a past president of the Dallas Association of School Librarians. Currently, she’s a member of the Young Adult Library Services Association board of directors. In addition to serving on the board, Tagoe is also active in the Texas Library Association as a member of its legislative committee. She holds a bachelor’s in French, with a minor in history, from the University of Oklahoma; a master’s of bilingual education from Southern Methodist University; and an MLS from Texas Woman’s University.

Student-centered learning is now a common phrase in education, but what does it look like? How can teachers who are accustomed to being in charge start to share power with students? These were some of the questions that led Miriam Plotinsky to write her book, “Teach More, Hover Less: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Secondary Classroom.”

Plotinsky is an instructional specialist in Montgomery County, Maryland, and a former language arts teacher. She said “Teach More, Hover Less” was born from conversations with colleagues about how they appreciated the theories in many education books but needed more advice on application. She wanted to create a resource with practical strategies for breaking the habits of what she calls “helicopter teaching.” She describes this phenomenon as micromanaging students “by controlling every single aspect of instruction.”

Helicopter teaching is usually driven by fear that without the teacher’s control, curriculum will fall apart, pacing will be off and students will be less focused. Plotinsky believes that this approach signals to students that teachers don’t trust them. She said she  taught this way for almost a decade before students in a creative writing elective showed her other possibilities. Initially, she planned a variety of writing assignments, such as character sketches, children’s books and scary stories for Halloween. But then students asked if they could submit alternative pieces — stories and essays they were working on that didn’t match the boundaries of her assignments.

Plotinsky’s gut reaction was an emphatic “no.” She wanted students to try what she’d planned. “But then after a while, I thought, why not? They’re writing. And they’re passionate,” she recalled.

The difference was obvious. “As I released more and more of that ‘it has to be this way’ mentality, they were so excited to come to class. So incredibly excited,” she said. That led her to make other changes, such as inviting students to create their own writing prompts for classmates. In the ensuing years, she applied this new hover-free approach to other courses she taught.

“The obvious question is, what do you do when it’s the core content class? And maybe it can’t always be quite as much of a party,” she said. “But at the same time … you can be more flexible. So it’s just being open to the possibility of agility. And then you’ll see kids be more interested in what they’re doing, and that’s reflected in the work.”

In her book, Plotinsky details four stages for moving away from helicopter teaching. Given the busy lives of teachers, she said this shift can be gradual. Teachers can try modifying a single lesson by keeping the content but rethinking the approach. Learning to recognize helicopter teaching and to use student feedback to guide instruction are good starting points.

Recognizing helicopter teaching

There are three obvious symptoms of a micromanaged classroom, according to Plotinksy.

1. An overpacked agenda: This is when teachers have every moment of the class period planned out and often more. “We probably won’t get to all of this, but…” is a common phrase.
2. Little student talk: This happens when most of the class is devoted to silent work or teacher talk. Some educators and administrators assume that a quiet classroom is a well-managed and productive classroom, but Plotinsky disagrees.
3. Discussions dominated by only a few students: This is when a class features frequent dialogue but mainly between the teacher and a few vocal students, while others act as observers. 

Plotinsky said she was guilty of all three of these early in her career. Book discussions in her class, for example, often involved a small group of students expressing ideas similar to her own. At the time, she viewed those classes as a success, but reflecting now, she sees a problem: 25 of the students in the room might not have said a word.

She offered a simple idea for more inclusive class discussions: Give each student one or two index cards. After speaking, they throw their card into the middle of the room and listen to others. Plotinsky recommended that the topic for this style of discussion be open-ended and low-risk, not something that feels like a “gotcha” about homework assignments. She also recommended explaining the process and giving students time to think about the question before jumping in.

By adopting practices like these, Plotinsky noticed that students who other teachers saw as quiet felt more comfortable speaking in her class. “That was a huge benefit — that people found voices in a way that they hadn’t before.”

Using student feedback

Requesting and using student feedback is a key part of Plotinsky’s concept of hover-free teaching. She likes to ask students three things in every unit:

1. What they already know
2. How they learn best
3. What has worked and what hasn’t in the class or in the past

Those questions can be asked through online forms or other kinds of exit tickets. As a classroom teacher, Plotinsky would share with students what they collectively said worked and didn’t work and how she was integrating that feedback into class plans. She couldn’t always make requested changes, but she said that being transparent made students more engaged.

Like other aspects of hover-free teaching, getting student feedback can be nerve-wracking. “It’s scary to hear what kids think, but it becomes less scary the more we do it, because then it’s less of a surprise,” Plotinsky said. “And then what happens is it gets kind of addictive.”

Why learn art in school?

The arts have been part of public education almost from the beginning. Nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann, the father of American public schools, believed that the arts enhanced learning. He made drawing and music part of the Massachusetts curriculum for “common schools.” Many decades later, labor unions and progressives saw the arts as a way for the working class to develop intellectually and be empowered.

Arts education steadily increased throughout most of the 20th century. But in the 1970s, the arts began to fall victim to fiscal crises and budget cuts. Arts classes were further squeezed out after a 2001 federal law required schools to test children annually. Schools with low test scores felt pressure to devote more time to reading and math. Then the 2008 recession slashed school art budgets even more. The poorest students were sometimes left with no art in school at all.

Arts advocates grew increasingly alarmed and marshaled evidence for why the arts matter. Proponents made claims for how instruction in the arts raises grades, boosts SAT scores and increases the rate of college going.

In Houston, Texas, almost 30 percent of the schools had no fine arts teachers in 2013-14. The city’s art community, from the Houston Ballet to the Alley Theater and the Houston Symphony, wanted to rectify this and, together with philanthropies, offered low-cost art performances, field trips and education programs to schools. The schools would have to kick in only $5 to $10 per student for the year.

Large trial

More schools signed up than the program could handle. And this provided a rare opportunity to put arts education to a rigorous test to see what its benefits and opportunity costs really are. Researchers randomly assigned 21 elementary and middle schools to receive arts education first and watched what happened to 8,000 of their students in grades three through eight. They compared them with 8,000 students at 21 other schools that had to wait and didn’t get the extra arts for at least a couple years.

The students in both groups were demographically similar: One quarter of the students were Black, two-thirds were Hispanic. More than 85 percent of their families were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Of course, it wasn’t a blind test. The students knew they were getting art and there was no placebo, but it’s as close as you get to a pharmaceutical drug trial in education.

The arts programming itself ranged a lot. Sometimes artists visited the schools and taught a series of weekly lessons in dance or theater. Other times students went on field trips to museums where art educators explained paintings and sculptures. Sometimes it was a one-off symphony performance with a discussion afterward.

Results

After at least a year of this artistic potpourri, the academic performance of students in math, reading and science was no different for those who got more art. Their state test scores were neither better nor worse than students who didn’t get art. To the researchers, that was good news.

“Schools that are struggling in math and reading are worried about where they can make space in the schedule to squeeze art in. They worry that math and reading is going to get worse if we add the arts,” said Daniel Bowen, an associate professor at Texas A&M University and one of the study’s co-authors. “That didn’t happen.”

While art won’t ruin math scores, the researchers found that art led to improvements in student behavior and other social-emotional skills that students need.

Disciplinary infractions were 3.6 percentage points lower among students who had more art exposure, according to the study, Investigating the Causal Effects of Arts Education, which published online in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in November 2022. In the schools without art, 14.5 percent of students were disciplined compared to only 10.9 percent of students in the schools with art. The researchers also detected an increase in students’ compassion for others, or emotional empathy, based on student surveys. The surveys also found that elementary school students, who made up the majority of the students in the study, were more engaged in school and had stronger college aspirations.

During the study, the researchers conducted focus groups with principals, who said it was hard to make the case for art when they’re under pressure to raise math scores. This study, the researchers said, can help school leaders argue that the arts foster soft skills that can be just as, if not more, important than test scores to children’s futures.

“There’s good reason to believe that arts education just improves student engagement. It is something that can make learning more intriguing and fun and interesting. And that’s what we found,” said Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, and the other co-author of the study.

That higher student engagement, however, didn’t translate into better school attendance. Absenteeism was similar for both groups of schools, with and without art.

The only academic benefit from art at all was in one aspect of writing, as measured by Texas state assessments. Students who’d received more art lessons exhibited stronger ideas and thoughts, but not writing mechanics, such as spelling or grammar.

Dose of Reality

I wondered if it was a disappointment not to see greater academic benefits from exposure to art. But the researchers emphatically said “no.”

Kisida explained that most of the academic claims made by arts proponents are “dubious.” Yes, students who take more art classes tend to be better students, but there is no proof that the arts are making them smarter.

“We don’t know if it’s the arts that are doing the heavy lifting there, or if it’s just that students who are interested in the arts or whose parents push them into the arts are also students who excel in other areas,” said Kisida.

This large randomized controlled trial of art proves that academic gains – at least in the short run – are unlikely. Kisida says that this is a healthy dose of reality for arts advocates.

To be sure, cognitive scientists and literacy experts believe that knowledge of the world is important for reading comprehension and critical thinking. One reason is because it’s easier to absorb a new reading passage if a student is already familiar with the topic. But it would likely take years of accumulated art knowledge – and dozens of museum visits and theater performances – to see reading comprehension improve.

This story about art in school was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

This discussion with Jerry Craft is part of a series of interviews with — and essays by — authors who are finding their books being challenged and banned in the U.S.

Cartoonist and children’s book author Jerry Craft published the Newbery award-winning graphic novel New Kid in 2019. New Kid also won the Coretta Scott King Author Award and the Kirkus Prize.

Craft followed the book with Class Act in 2020 and, coming in April 2023, School Trip. His novels focus on portraying the experiences of kids of color. Craft’s work allows kids to see themselves in stories, provoking inspiration and giving voice to diverse experiences.

New Kid focuses on the experience of being Black and the “new kid” at a predominantly white school. It follows Jordan, a seventh grader and aspiring artist from Washington Heights, New York. Jordan’s parents send him to a private school to invest in his academic future. As he navigates the differing environments in his neighborhood and his new school, he attempts to stay true to himself.

The book has been challenged in some school districts including in Texas and Pennsylvania, citing the teaching of critical race theory.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

On capturing reality

In my opinion, a lot of the books with African American protagonists … there’s this really big thing that happens — a life changing event, catastrophic, death or police or someone goes to jail or drugs — and I didn’t want to show that. So there is no catastrophe in New Kid, but it’s just kind of the day-to-day code switching you get so used to at an early age. My dad lived in the time where they had white drinking fountains and Black drinking fountains. So, I’m only one generation removed from that. He didn’t expect anything… So when you think of the things that our ancestors had to deal with and even stuff that my dad [dealt with], having someone call you the wrong name or touch your hair — it’s not catastrophic by nature. It’s annoying. I really did want to have a book where you could read it and relax and just kind of subtly point out things that we can all do to improve how these kids grow up.

On inspiring Black kids by depicting positive new narratives

You’re trained in a lot of ways to be a second class citizen. Even taking my sons to the movies, whereas their white counterparts — if they wanted to see someone that looked like them — their parents took them to see Harry Potter and, you know, Percy Jackson. Our version was 12 Years a Slave and Harriet Tubman… There just aren’t a lot of happy stories. Even when I was a kid, the show Good Times was very popular. But for a show called “good times,” they never really had any good times.

… I have a teacher who emailed me [about how] all the kids were going around saying what they wanted to do when they grow up [and] a Black kid in class goes, “Well, if I live to be 18, I hope to… ” So, I wanted to have a book where there is hope. In School Trip, which comes out in April, the kids go to Paris. And I’m already reading some early reviews [about how people] love the book…but occasionally someone will go “well I don’t think the kids will be able to relate going to Paris… But [a] kid could relate to being a wizard like Harry Potter or going into space or going back in time or any of the other fantasy things. But a Black kid won’t be able to relate to going to another country… If I wrote about a dystopian future where a 13-year-old white kid saves the world single handedly, that’s relatable?

So, when I do new kid in class, not only am I doing this for kids to show that they do have hope and futures — but I also want to point out to parents and some of the teachers and librarians who put these emotional and mental shackles on their kids [thinking] ‘I’m not even going to give them this book because [they’ll] never be able to relate to going to Paris.’ …Why can’t a kid have those kinds of aspirations where one day they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, I’d like to go there like Jordan Banks did’ as opposed to, ‘Hey, here’s another gang book.’ So what? I can relate to that, I can relate to being in a gang. I can relate to being enslaved… but it’s such a discrepancy. …They give them all these hard stories and then they forget that they’re kids.

On representation in children and young adult books

When I do these [school visits] on zoom or in person, it’s about me being a very reluctant reader. I hated reading books as a kid because — who were my heroes? The Black kid in Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn? There was no kid who looked like me that I was proud of. It was Black Panther … which came out, what, five years ago, that was the first time where I had goosebumps. That and Into the Spider-verse. I felt like I was 10 years old. What I would have given to have something like that when I was ten.

But one of the big problems that I have is… [people saying], ‘oh, well… you’re making white kids feel bad.’ A lot of these books — especially historical books — you’ll have a book like Ruby Bridges, or stories where these 8-year-old kids are single-handedly integrating the school systems and there are people throwing stuff or cursing: So, those kids can handle that — but your little kid can’t handle reading about that because it makes them feel bad? And I think most times kids empathize with the main characters. I don’t think that kids ever empathize with the bullies. And if they do, I don’t think that you’re doing your job as a parent properly. Because when I read a graphic novel like El Deafo by Cece Bell, which is amazing, or Hey, Kiddo, Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s book — these are all kids who are teased because they’re different. And again, if you raise your kid to not be able to have empathy for the one who’s the target of the bullies … I have white kids dressing up like Jordan Banks and Drew for Halloween. It’s one of their favorite characters, kids don’t emulate the bad guys. And if they do, like I said, you might have missed a couple of parenting sessions that you probably should put in.

On who decides what is appropriate reading

I’m a parent… I do think that, as a parent, you have every right to decide what your kid can and cannot read… But you don’t have the right to tell me what my kid can read. Because a lot of time kids will find themselves in books. They may not even be able to have [certain] discussions at home. I don’t know what it’s like at 12 years old to realize that I’m gay and I want to come out to my parents who are going to hate me and disown me because of that. But there are books with those characters that kids can find out that they’re not the only ones.

Claire Murashima produced the broadcast version of this story. Meghan Collins Sullivan edited this story for the web.

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