Chris Habetler

The College Board — the organization that designs the Advanced Placement college-level curricula for high school students — recently removed a number of terms from a draft course on African American studies. One of the key words that disappeared ? “Systemic.”

In editing out this term, the College Board lost an opportunity to help young people learn and think critically about the connection between the design of our institutions and the uneven way in which opportunity and resources are meted out in America.

The debate about whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis influenced this decision misses a bigger point. These language changes speak volumes about the current state of American culture and what’s required to move it forward.

Conservative activists claim that the curricula changes are about keeping “politics” out of the classroom. But I see this as a troubling example of state power being used to censor ideas. I worry about a future where students haven’t been exposed to accurate, complete perspectives on our past.

I think we’d all agree on one thing: The College Board made these changes under pressure.

We can argue about what should or should not be in a school curriculum, but the real work also lies as much in changing the culture that these arguments rest upon.

But where did this pressure come from? Pointing to politicians or social media influencers only gets us so far. We need to look at the cultural mindsets that make it possible for the term “systemic racism” to become a topic of educational controversy.

Cultural mindsets are understandings and assumptions that run under our surface opinions. They shape how we see the world and act in it.

As a psychological anthropologist, I have been studying these mindsets for the last 20 years and have found a set of them — individualism, otherism and fatalism — that underlie many Americans’ thinking about racism. These mindsets don’t justify the College Board’s decisions, but they do show us what must be done to move culture to a place where there isn’t pressure to remove words like “systemic” and “reparations” from a high school class.

These mindsets point to the need for more explanatory stories — in our public discourse and in public education — about social systems of all kinds and systemic racism in particular. These stories must explain why these systems exist, how their design shapes our lives, and what we need to do to redesign them to achieve different results. Importantly, these stories must make the collective importance of this redesigning for the future of our country clear and undeniable.

Digging Into Cultural Mindsets

Systemic racism refers to the way that discrimination and prejudice get written into the code of the policies and practices that shape our lives. This includes the health care system , the criminal legal system , the education system , the housing system , the economic system and more. Experts who study systemic racism agree that our public policies and institutions are set up in ways that provide an unjust advantage to some racial and ethnic groups and perpetuate an unfair disadvantage to others.

Yet there are several cultural mindsets that make the concept of systemic racism fraught for many Americans — particularly white Americans.

First is the idea that success and failure are the exclusive result of how hard someone tries. This individualism underlies the inclination to assess deservingness and determine, paradoxically, that those denied opportunities are undeserving of support. This mindset explains any lack of well-being that someone experiences as a failure of character, leaving no space to critique the broader systems that make opportunities available to some and not others .

The College Board also faced pressure from the cultural mindset of otherism — the threat that many Americans feel to their status as the idea of structural racism has gained currency. In this mindset, apportioning any more for others — even if “more” means recognizing and compensating for injustice — feels like receiving less for themselves.

If these mindsets aren’t toxic enough, the idea of systemic racism presents additional challenges for many Americans.

There is also a strong sense of fatalism — a third cultural mindset — attached to thinking about systemic racism. People understand systems in a nebulous and naturalistic way — that systems are above and beyond human intervention. The result is that people view anything embedded in or caused by a system as intransigent and beyond intervention. As a result, we disengage and resist discussions of problems that are framed at this systems level.

These challenges don’t mean that teachers and students — or those communicating in the public sphere more generally — should shy away from systems discussions. Instead, it highlights the opportunity to lean into such conversations and the importance of an explanatory approach. The very fact that the College Board removed the concept of “systemic” from the curriculum shows us just how important it is to discuss and explain systems: how they work, their effects and how they can be redesigned.

Until those of us who are working to shape the discussion in and outside the classroom shift these underlying mindsets and rebalance the cultural terrain that shapes Americans’ understanding about racism, people who are responsible for making decisions about our country’s institutions (like our education system) will be bound and limited in the directions they feel they can pursue to achieve full inclusion, opportunity, access and equity. We can argue about what should or should not be in a school curriculum, but the real work also lies as much in changing the culture that these arguments rest upon.

This requires persistently advancing a narrative that makes the effect of systems on the social problems we experience clear and apparent. It requires a narrative that makes the designed nature of these systems undeniable. It requires a narrative that talks with pragmatism and hope about our ability to redesign these systems for more equal outcomes and establishes the urgency of these changes in securing a future for the country in which everyone has a part and an opportunity to be well and thrive.

Pushing back against mindsets that lead to bad decisions — like censoring history lessons for students — requires advancing alternative ways of thinking that make better decisions seem like common sense.

Source

When a Texas task force set out to draft a plan for attracting and keeping more teachers in the state’s schools, it ran into its first problem before work ever began.

The group initially was composed of school district leaders and had no more than one teacher, recalls Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. That didn’t sit well with him or members of the Texas AFT.

“We started making a fuss about it, and they ended up getting an equal number [of teachers],” Capo says of the task force, which ultimately had 23 teachers and 23 administrators. “It actually was a tangible piece of evidence to see what we were talking about when we say there is a lack of respect for educators — when you don’t even want to have them on a committee to talk about what would keep them in a classroom.”

At school you teach and support students. At home you answer emails, grade, plan, and analyze data. There is no such thing as balance. … This is a crisis.

Texas teacher who recently quit, in response to a survey by the state’s Teacher Vacancy Task Force

The changed makeup of the Teacher Vacancy Task Force, in Capo’s view, helped to surface one of the group’s key recommendations for how changes to working conditions could attract teachers to the state — and entice them to stay.

After somewhat predictable sections about low teacher pay and the need for better teacher-training pathways, the report includes a section on a topic so mundane it’s almost startling: “Demonstrate Respect and Value for Teacher Time.”

In it, the report authors list the myriad tasks, in addition to instruction, that teachers do as part of their jobs — meeting with parents, participating in professional development, grading. Those responsibilities all regularly tip teachers’ work weeks past 40 hours.

It’s a reality that troubles teachers across the country. The typical teacher works a median of 54 hours a week, according to a nationally representative survey from 2022 administered by the EdWeek Research Center. And among educators from 14 different schools studied by a Harvard researcher for the 2019 book “Where Teachers Thrive ,” most teachers said they did not have enough time to accomplish the “essential” duties of their jobs.

To address this, the report authors recommended the Texas Education Agency launch a time study to get a full picture of teachers’ never-ending time crunch. That study could be used to help administrators overhaul their teachers’ schedules, the task force writes, and free them up from non-teaching tasks that eat away at time that could be spent collaborating with peers, reviewing their students’ learning data and generally making their lessons better.

“I work at least one day every weekend. I grade papers at night. One 45-minute planning period is not enough time to prep for three different classes,” a high school teacher surveyed by the task force wrote. “I love teaching, but if things do not change, I will be looking for another job. I have been teaching for 15 years, but this lifestyle is not sustainable for me or my family.”

Rethinking the Education Workload

What would it mean to respect teachers’ time?

According to educators, a crucial part of that is leaders recognizing the hours teachers are expected to put in, long after the last bell rings.

“Teaching is like two full-time jobs,” a Texas teacher who recently quit wrote in a survey to the task force. “At school you teach and support students. At home you answer emails, grade, plan, and analyze data. There is no such thing as balance. … This is a crisis.”

The report notes that, in other countries with strong education systems, teachers typically spend less time in front of students and more time engaged in planning and professional development. Capo says U.S. teachers shouldn’t have their days packed wall-to-wall with classes at the expense of allowing them time to work on their lessons and discuss ideas with their colleagues. Preparation time is an expectation of just about every profession, he laments, but isn’t afforded to teachers.

“It’s expected professional time to actually improve your craft,” Capo says. “It’s not present for teachers in the U.S. because we prioritize direct instructional time. We prioritize the fewest amount of people necessary to oversee students for the longest period of the day.”

It should come as no surprise, he says, that many teachers feel “like they’re glorified babysitters.”

Having time to prepare for classes during working hours is especially vital for new teachers, says Valerie Sakimura, executive director at Deans for Impact. The organization aims to improve education by raising the bar for teacher preparation programs.

New teachers who feel overwhelmed and unsupported are likely to leave their jobs, Sakimura adds. They need time to find mentorship among more experienced teachers if they’re going to improve their practice.

One recommendation from “Where Teachers Thrive” is ensuring that schools provide teachers with appropriate curricula and materials, rather than expecting teachers to devise or find their own. That’s echoed in the Texas report, which cites studies showing that teachers report spending hours a week searching for instructional materials.

“It’s so much [work] without adding on top of that, designing your own lessons from scratch,” Sakimura says. “When I talk to teachers in their first and second years, they’re telling stories of sitting in their living room and crying at 2 a.m. on Teachers Pay Teachers,” a popular platform that educators use to buy educational materials from each other .

Even if schools have high-quality curricula that can take some lesson-planning off teachers’ shoulders, they can’t use it if they don’t have time or aren’t trained on how to use it.

“It’s important to be able to think about recruitment and strategies around workplace culture and other issues like compensation,” Sakimura says, “if we’re really going to tackle some of the challenges we’ve had [keeping people] in the profession who are really prepared and feel equipped to do right by kids.”

In addition to craving more planning time, studies have found that teachers want to devote their working hours to, well, teaching. The EdWeek Research Center survey found that teachers want to spend more time on instruction and less time doing administrative tasks or monitoring the hallways.

As one middle school teacher told the Texas task force: “Today, in too many schools to count, teachers are not given sufficient time to do what they were hired to do: teach.”

Source

One of my rituals at the start of each school year is to clean student desks and chairs. Year after year, before students arrive for their first day of school, I scrub and shine these desks. My hands, raw from cleaner, fail to remove remnants of short-lived romances tattooed into the laminate. Profanity from past students lives on in the rubber sidings of these desks. These are the same desks I used when I was a student. As I clean, I imagine what my classroom would look like – what it might become – with an interior makeover. It is not often that we see an overhaul of the furniture in our public school classrooms, let alone in the middle of the school year. But this year, it actually happened!

Last November, there was an anonymous donation of mobile desk chairs to our school. For context, these mobile desk chairs were all the hype in the mid-2010s, popping up in every private school or innovation academy that screamed flexible seating. When I attended professional development courses or local conferences that were equipped with this furniture, I giddily rolled across the room in these chairs. I imagined what it would be like to learn as a student in these spaces with the freedom to move, spin, group and separate as I pleased.

After the school received the donation of desk chairs, an administrator asked if the teachers would like to have any for their classrooms. A few days after my administrator approved my request for five chairs, I found out there were nearly a hundred donated. Building up the courage to ask for more, I sent a long-winded, evidence-based email to my administrators asking them to test it out in my science classroom, taking the opportunity to shake up our physical space – and perhaps emit an air of fancifulness.

My hesitancy was not about the number of chairs I could get replaced for my classroom, but more about what I could live with. In this role, we often operate in what we can deal with and less what we deserve as public school educators.

Like all teachers, I wanted to give my students the world – one desk chair at a time.

The Student Response

After a suspenseful week, I received an approval email. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to share the news with my students. On a Monday morning after a long weekend, I greeted the class and said, “Guess what? We are getting new chairs!”

At first, the class went silent. Some students shrugged. I continued, “We are going to get those super cool rolling chairs with desks!” hoping to latch them into excitement. I showed them a picture of the chairs. Then, to my shock, the students relented. A few exclaimed, “This is a bad idea!”

I was confused. Feeling embattled, I prodded into what they meant. The students explained that if I provided these new desk chairs to every student, I would be unable to manage classroom behavior; they envisioned their classmates rolling out of the classroom and into the walkways. While an amusing thought, I was stunned and had to reflect: was my intent to ever control bodily autonomy in class? Did they feel that I discouraged them from movement?

Next, a student asked, “Did you have to buy them yourself?” While a common question for folks in public education, I was shocked that my students wondered if I paid for classroom furniture myself. Sure, I stock up on stacks of colorful paper, crayons and pipe cleaners during clearance sales, but I couldn’t swing this purchase, even if I tried. These chairs cost $600 each online, not including shipping and freight; even the most robust teacher salary couldn’t carry the burden of a class set.

I settled their curiosity with the reminder that these chairs were donated. They weren’t brand new, just new to us, much like the laptops from industry partners and out-of-date lab equipment from the nearby college. Hand-me-down supplies are a common sight in our public school classroom, and any time we receive shiny new tech and supplies, they are usually from DonorsChoose. At this point, my students and I are conditioned to write thank you letters of gratitude, attaching photo evidence of utility.

Then, a few other students asserted, “We don’t deserve this, we can do without it.” That statement finally stopped me in my tracks. It was then that I saw the ingrained sense of worth that society has etched into our public schools. Our lesson on mitosis was put on hold, and a new lesson emerged: instead of focusing on what students need, we must ask, what do students deserve in public schools?

What Our Students Deserve

Our public school students deserve the world. Though they are students now, one day they will become the leaders and decision-makers in our communities. They represent the beautiful diversity of cultures, beliefs, abilities and gifts that come with the knowledge and appreciation of our histories. Students may begrudge the grind of notetaking, problem-solving and producing content because they would rather be elsewhere. They know they need and should learn this information but rarely do our students think about what they deserve when it comes to their education.

Amongst my students, there is an unspoken expectation of what classroom behavior looks like. Similar to what a cursory administrator walkthrough might expect, students perceive quiet and stationary behaviors as positive. The “culture of power ” to keep students obedient – silent and still – is firmly fixed into our students’ perceptions of classroom protocol, yet we know this to be false. Students learn best when active , participatory and engaged in mind and body. Compliance as a pedagogy will not produce the mindful and empathetic innovators our future needs.

Our public school students deserve a quality education as much as they deserve to learn in comfort and flexibility. The joys of temperature-controlled rooms , soft chairs and ample charging stations are key characteristics of many college classrooms and office jobs – why must K-12 students wait to access higher learning for a comfortable seat? What does gatekeeping comfort and movement achieve?

What the Super Cool Swivel Chairs Taught Us

When our chairs arrived in mid-December, our class watched as the old desks and chairs were removed from the classroom. We watched as the graffiti, old gum wads, and termite droppings were escorted out. Each student happily picked out their new seat, excitedly realizing original table layouts did not constrain them. They pivoted towards the board and swiveled right back to small group conversations. We spent a few minutes learning how to adjust the desk and chairs for their comfort. They were no longer expected to accept what was handed to them. They had a sense of autonomy and responsibility for their embodied experience in the classroom.

A few months later, the students remained enthusiastic. The temptation to roll out of the classroom has passed, and students are learning to advocate for what they deserve. During an hour-long class period, we are able to move from partner conversations and whole-group lectures into independent activities quickly and efficiently. Physical autonomy for students’ sense of space has improved and classroom visitors notice consistent student engagement and the flexibility for students to opt in and out of groups. Changing the perspective from what they need to what they deserve, our students now hold high expectations for themselves, their classmates and their education. This is the public education they deserve.

Source

How can teachers engage students to learn problem-solving skills across the curriculum? One program has set out to teach computational thinking (CT) and coding skills in a problem-centered approach, fostering a student-driven learning design. In the process, students develop persistence and creativity while teachers connect their learning with professional standards aligned with ISTE micro-credentials .

Such a mindset change can eventually produce a more innovative learning and teaching approach across other areas.

Tony Lam, head of mathematics at Marymount Primary School in Hong Kong, recognized the mindset change required to create a student-centered coding experience. Instead of simply giving step-by-step instructions for students to develop computer programs in a teacher-centered approach, he encourages students to solve problems via active learning.

Lam, who began learning to code six years ago, developed his skills at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Master Trainer Program in Boston, an experience sponsored by his school and supported by CoolThink@JC . Now, he hosts professional development workshops and lesson demonstrations for other teachers in Hong Kong. Recently, EdSurge spoke with Lam about his experience as a teacher leader for CoolThink@JC InnoCommunity , a community supported by over 50 frontline and dedicated teachers, serving over 100 primary schools.

EdSurge: How would you describe the CoolThink curriculum adoption for your school?

Lam: Marymount, an all-girls school, was one of the first primary schools in Hong Kong to implement the CoolThink curriculum . Professors and lecturers from MIT and the Education University of Hong Kong (EDUHK) provided 78 hours of training to the first batch of teachers to explore and learn the CoolThink curriculum. EDUHK held regular workshops to update teachers on any developments and changes in the program.

Tony Lam

The CoolThink curriculum offers a new element to the overall programs of our school and provides new opportunities for girls to become digital creators and makers by learning to code. CoolThink is a milestone in STEM education in Hong Kong, providing a comprehensive and proven framework for computational thinking and coding education. CoolThink’s mission of preparing students’ computational thinking skills—critical thinking, problem-solving and empowerment—are essential for digital competence in today’s AI-powered world where the ability to think critically and determine fact from fiction is extremely important. AI or ChatGPT won’t replace you any time soon, but someone using AI will.

Once we were accustomed to the CoolThink curriculum structure, we customized some aspects, such as the themes and difficulty levels, to suit our students’ learning needs and interests. For instance, we created a unit called Mascot Random Generator, in which students create an app that can randomly generate one of the six School Value Mascots, or they can customize the app to randomly generate anything, like pop stars or favorite food. Another example is the collaboration of technology and mathematics panels to guide the students to create arithmetic programs to solve particular problems like finding the greatest common factor.

Eventually, I started to train the trainers and provide support for others to learn the CoolThink curriculum. We collaborated with Hong Kong’s Education Bureau and held teacher workshops to share our experiences. We also hosted student workshops in other schools that had not yet joined the CoolThink project to provide learning opportunities for students and demonstrate to the teachers how CoolThink lessons work. We collaborated with MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node to provide professional development for teachers in blended learning mode. It is crucial to have more trainer mentors so that the teacher-learning community will keep growing and ensure the continuous development of computational thinking and coding education.

We guide [students] to observe, think about critical features and problem-solve before they start to code.

How do teachers and students benefit from a problem-centered coding curriculum?

This curriculum has changed my teaching mindset. The CoolThink pedagogy emphasizes To Play, To Think, To Code, To Reflect . We encourage students to explore the apps that they will eventually create. We guide them to observe, think about critical features and problem-solve before they start to code. The CoolThink curriculum is motivating and interactive, inspiring students to create, experiment and debug with less direction from teachers.

Such a mindset change can eventually produce a more innovative learning and teaching approach across other areas. I now duplicate the same framework in my mathematics lessons. Instead of simply drilling mathematics problems, I invite students to share what mathematical concepts they have applied through games they create.

CoolThink provides equal access and learning opportunity for students regardless of their backgrounds, especially those from low-income and ethnic minority groups. For example, one of our students did not excel in the traditional curriculum despite being very creative and logical. But when we introduced the CoolThink curriculum in our school, she did a lot of research online to learn and create different apps. She joined coding competitions and won several prizes. Learning to code also motivated her learning in mathematics and art. Now she plans to attend a university and be a scientist.

---

The CoolThink Pedagogy. Image Credit: CoolThink

---

How does CoolThink help address the digital divide and prepare students for the future?

CoolThink prepares students for entrepreneurship by empowering them with confidence and creativity, transforming students from digital consumers to digital creators.

In the kick-start phase, CoolThink provides aid to schools by hiring additional teacher assistants and purchasing digital devices, which allows students from different social classes to have equal access to hardware and learning resources. A CoolThink YouTube channel with more than 100 teaching videos is available for Cantonese-speaking students. CoolThink provides equal access to information and resources for students so that all students can become programmers.

CoolThink prepares students for many pathways by helping them acquire basic computational thinking concepts and building a foundation in programming languages early. This helps students become more sufficient self-learners in coding and broaden their career choices in STEM-related fields. CT practices like testing and debugging and being incremental and iterative also develop their perseverant spirit in problem-solving. CoolThink prepares students for entrepreneurship by empowering them with confidence and creativity, transforming students from digital consumers to digital creators.

Source

Engagement and creativity play such important roles in the learning process, but with the myriad of other requirements and obligations, they can easily get lost in the abyss of deadlines and mandates. Creativity helps develop a deeper sense of learning, yet we keep our “creative” units until after state testing is over. Recently, I met with two education leaders to discuss how to improve teacher and student engagement through creativity.

Why does creativity matter?

Being future-ready is more than just being ready for college or securing a job; it’s thinking creatively about the problems we face as a society.

Sir Ken Robinson says, “Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.” In schools, creativity can be harder to imagine in core subject areas like math and easier to associate with humanities and arts. However, creativity shouldn’t be reserved for just those content areas. Building in more creativity comes down to student agency—teaching students to find their voice.

“It’s about empowering students to find what is unique about them, finding their own voice, their story,” says Ben Forta, a senior director of education initiatives at Adobe. “It’s letting them discover the joy of learning.”

Ultimately, we want our students to be successful beyond the classroom walls. Being future-ready is more than just being ready for college or securing a job; it’s thinking creatively about the problems we face as a society. Creativity is about making a major impact on learning. According to a Gallup article , schools that promote creativity see improved scores on standardized tests and results of deeper understanding.

Creativity encourages problem-solving, critical thinking, iteration, collaboration and making deep connections in students’ learning material. Schools can struggle with fostering creativity when they are too focused on a desired outcome, too prescriptive and not allowing for individuality and student agency.

Learning should also be somewhat uncomfortable. Many of the world’s most creative ideas have come as a result of an unconformable struggle. Staff and students working in a space that allows for creative risk-taking rather than compliance and conformity can struggle at first. Presenting a project without a true, correct answer can jar the more traditionally aligned student or teacher. Creativity is about giving students room to play and grow while recognizing that individual students may grow in different ways and at different paces, and that’s actually desirable.

Martha Bongiorno
School Library and Instructional Technology Lead at Fulton County Schools

How did the pandemic affect creativity?

During the pandemic, schools with the infrastructure in place for moving to online learning found greater immediate success. They already had student devices and an established method for digital transactions between home and the teacher. But more important than infrastructure is a mindset. How flexible were the classrooms before the pandemic? Did students have agency and choice regarding how they completed their projects and showed understanding? Staying nimble and flexible as a regular state of operation has a higher likelihood of success during a major learning disruption like a pandemic.

What are the hurdles to overcome so that creativity happens more in schools?

Why aren’t more schools pushing a creative mindset if we know it is powerful for learning? Several factors create roadblocks to creativity happening in classrooms.

Sometimes, there is a belief that creative projects should be saved for the end of the week or even the end of the semester. Martha Bongiorno, a school library and instructional technology lead at Fulton County Schools in Georgia, describes how creativity is sometimes the “dessert” content that is only offered to students who mastered the main course. During the pandemic, she saw creativity pushed away as schools scrambled to get the traditional core content out to students. Even though teachers modeled creative problem-solving to virtually reach their students, there was limited time for creativity as a skill. Bongiorno argues that creativity can’t be an afterthought in the curriculum. Creativity needs to be embedded in everything we do with students; it needs to be part of the school culture.

Creativity needs to be embedded in everything we do with students; it needs to be part of the school culture.

Forta notes that it often comes down to prioritization. Teachers are overwhelmed, now more than ever. They have so much that they must do, and creativity takes a back seat to all the other initiatives. Time is always a concern. Some of the most interesting and complex project-based lessons take many hours to prepare and score. Assessment is more involved as projects being graded for creativity are more challenging than just checking a worksheet to see what answers the student got right or wrong. It’s about evaluating the process and the product of what they learned, which can be intimidating and time-consuming. Add to all of this the external pressures of standardized testing, top-down mandates, traditional grading and parent pressure—teachers find less controversy in just using traditional teaching practices.

There is a misunderstanding that creativity has to be separate instead of infused in all content. Forta insists we need to help teachers find ways to incorporate creativity into what they’re already doing to increase engagement and learning outcomes. The objective is happier and more engaged students and a reduced burden on our teachers. It sounds impossible, but there are educators and schools out there that are proving that it works, and educators like Bongiorno are leading the way.

---

Watch the full “Improving Teacher and Student Engagement Through Creativity” webinar on-demand now.

---

What should professional learning look like to help foster more creativity in the classroom?

Forta suggests professional development (PD) needs to be “empathetic, meaningful and pedagogically sound without worrying too much about the mechanics.” He is less concerned about the step-by-step details of how to use specific tools, and more about ensuring that educators understand why these tools add value, the right way to integrate them into lessons and how to make them meaningful and relevant. Just as the learning has to be meaningful to students, it must also be for adults.

Ben Forta
Author, educator and Senior Director of Education Initiatives at Adobe

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between people delivering professional learning and those receiving it. Bongiorno and Forta agree that PD should be created by teachers for teachers. The same agency we need to encourage in students should be provided to teachers. Whenever possible, ask fellow educators to lead the learning, as it can be much more impactful coming from a colleague who is a practitioner.

Bongiorno’s district uses a Vanguard team of educators from several schools to help facilitate professional learning. The Vanguard teachers are selected based on having a curious mindset and willingness to take risks to learn new tools and strategies, passing such techniques to their colleagues. Bongiorno asserts that creativity can be taught. It is a matter of tapping into individual strengths and encouraging them to develop.

How do we scale creativity?

For students and staff, sometimes infusing creativity needs to be built on a small scale. Not everyone feels creative, and even those that do sometimes have blockers that inhibit their creativity. However, all students and educators have different strengths that can be tapped for creativity when activated. Using the variety of challenges like those at the Adobe Education Exchange can be a place to start. Bongiorno notes these tools can serve as launching points for “community building, playing and designing” while building confidence. Using tools like the Innovator’s compass , students can see the value of using design thinking to solve community problems. Bongiorno adds, “It’s important that there is an authentic audience and that students can see that the things they are creating are making a difference.”

Most schools can point to a classroom or two on their campus where some really innovative ideas are happening. These pockets of creativity need to be celebrated and modeled. To truly help creativity spread, there need to be people that are local and vocal to really get out and talk with their peers to expand creative ideas. Forta adds, “We need to empower passionate educators within their own communities to tell the story for us. There’s an authenticity that can’t be matched when educators are hearing from other educators.”

And this energy around creativity then spreads to students. The more creativity you can infuse into your daily classroom routine, the more engaged students become. An engaged student with a sense of agency creates an atmosphere where their creative potential knows no bounds.

Source

After three years of facing heightened stress since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic — not just the safety worries, but also the political frays that have followed — it’s no wonder that some teachers are leaving the stormy seas of classroom instruction in search of calmer waters.

For the technically inclined, pivoting to a job in the education technology industry seems like a natural fit. When teachers pack up their classrooms for the last time to start their edtech careers, where exactly are they going?

Our recent analysis of teacher representation in edtech leadership revealed that former educators held a variety of top roles in the companies we sampled, heading teams that handled pedagogy, curriculum, product, marketing and sales.

Former educators told us they had moved on to become UX designers, part of sales teams and founders of their own edtech companies.

Teachers’ interest in making the leap from the classroom to edtech grew after COVID-19 hit, says Eva Brown, herself a former teacher who switched to edtech in 2011 after more than a decade in schools. Brown found herself sharing advice with so many educators looking to emulate her path that in 2021, she published a book on the subject.

In it, Brown not only gives advice on how teachers can begin their search but asks them to reflect deeply on whether an edtech transition is truly the right move for them. The teachers she coaches want a career change for myriad reasons — pandemic-induced stress, unreasonable workloads, lack of support of administrators, safety worries — but Brown says it all comes down to saving their mental health.

“Edtech is not going to be the solution for every teacher,” she says. “What I want to help them see is, ‘What are they looking for?’ I think so many of them are so desperate to get out of the classroom, and edtech is the buzzword that they hear. It looks easy when you start looking on Linkedin or Facebook or Instagram, but you don’t necessarily see the struggle and months of searching.”

Which Path to Take?

If they are ready to take the plunge, Brown says the next challenge teachers will face is figuring out which edtech roles best align with their skill set. She does edtech career coaching for educators and says many of those just starting out in their job search gravitate toward instructional design or customer success manager roles, types of workers they may have interacted with when they were teaching. (The work of customer success managers can differ depending on the company, but the title generally refers to people who help schools effectively use an edtech product they have purchased.)

“Many think about being a trainer, and then sales,” Brown says. “For a lot of people, their first gut instinct is, ‘I don’t want to do sales.’ I think that’s fair for teachers — they buy granola bars for students out of their own money, so they want to give stuff away — but others are good at it.”

Hillary Robbins, who spent 10 years as an elementary and middle school teacher in Texas, says she scoured the internet for information on making the jump to edtech before making any moves. She was familiar with roles held by former teachers who visited her school, like Brown mentioned — training consultants or people in edtech sales.

When Robbins left education in March 2021, it was for a client success specialist job at an edtech company. She has since been promoted to client success manager.

“It really closely aligns to the role of a teacher because that’s what we were doing with students,” Robbins says. “Meeting them where they are and creating a targeted plan to bring up their growth, that’s essentially the same skills that transfer to a client success manager.”

Transitioning to edtech would have been much harder about five years ago, she believes, because there weren’t as many resources available to help teachers get started. Now job seekers can turn to podcasts or TikTok’s #transitioningteachers community for advice on approaching the edtech job search.

Of the five CSMs on Robbins’ team, all of them are former teachers. It’s part of what drew her to the company, she says, having colleagues who share her experience on the other side of the edtech product.

“I wanted to find people that walked my path,” Robbins says.

@hillary_robbins Were you surprised? LMK! #careerchange #teacherquitting @hillary_robbins ♬ Roxanne – Instrumental – Califa Azul

Following her transition to edtech, Hillary Robbins has joined other former teachers in giving advice to peers who want to do the same.

Culture Shock

Brown stresses that when teachers start dipping their toes into the edtech job pool, they are going to be in for a few surprises. They will need to shape up — or create from scratch — their LinkedIn presence. They’re going to need to ask about training offered by their target companies. While teaching offers reliably renewed contracts, edtech workers can be laid off with little notice.

In fact, being laid off from her edtech consulting job in 2020 became the catalyst for the book. When she got her current position as a strategic customer success manager four months later, she was inundated with messages from teachers asking for advice about how they could do the same.

“I found that I had a book’s worth of information to share,” Brown says.

Teachers look to edtech for comparable or higher pay, Brown says, but some could be facing a pay cut depending on the role and cost of living. Some companies will base their pay on the region, while others offer a flat salary no matter where employees are based.

“The curve for them is learning the business side,” she says. “Teachers want a mid- or senior-level role because they’ve been teaching for 20 years, but they’re on a learning curve.”

Negotiating her salary was an adjustment for Nicole Jatzke, a former New Jersey teacher who left that industry in 2021, who was accustomed to salary rungs based on experience. It took her nearly a year to land her role as an account manager with an educational staffing company when she left education, and she started her search by looking for roles in edtech.

“I didn’t have anything lined up, but I knew it was time to go and make that leap of faith,” Jatzke says. “I’ll be very honest — I did not expect it to take me that long to land another position, but I would definitely advise any transitioning teacher: Don’t give up.”

Jatzke says teachers are accustomed to applying for jobs directly with school districts, which is far different from the process of researching positions with edtech and other educational companies.

With career coaching from Brown, Jatzke says she was able to see how her skills as an educator were transferable to roles on the corporate side of education. She also found a great source of support in other former teachers on LinkedIn who were willing to give advice — something Jatzke is now doing for educators looking to emulate her move out of the classroom.

Brown says that teachers shouldn’t wait until they’re ready to quit to think about what they want in the next five, 10 and 15 years. It’s a flaw of the education system going back to her days in the classroom that goal-setting isn’t a part of teachers’ professional development.

Unless they raise their hand and say that they want to move beyond the classroom, Brown says, it’s assumed that they want to be teachers forever. That can hurt them if they want to jump to edtech, where employers are looking for teachers who are leaders among their peers.

“The biggest struggle if you’ve always worked with students — when you apply in the corporate world, you need to be able to show what you’ve done with adults,” Brown says. “What can you do now, working with your peers, that will make you a much better candidate for the culture no matter what you want to do? It’s not that the students are not important, but for professional growth there’s another focus, as well.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the year in which Brown experienced a layoff.

Source

The last few years have been a strain on nearly everyone, with routines disrupted, social interactions curtailed, and stress and anxiety running high.

There’s been much written and discussed about how those challenges have impacted students in K-12 schools and colleges — how they’re suffering in the wake of the pandemic and experiencing alarmingly high rates of mental health concerns . But what about kids who are even younger — infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children who also lived through the pandemic and are not immune to the stressors that it caused?

Those kids — yes, even babies — have suffered too, experts say. And given how foundational this period of their lives is for future outcomes and development, it’s especially urgent that the mental health and well-being of infants and young children be addressed early.

“We like to say that the social-emotional health [and] mental health of little ones is all our jobs — anyone who touches the life of a child — because of the fact that brain development is so rapid in the prenatal-to-3 space of life,” says Meghan Schmelzer, senior manager of infant and early childhood mental health at the nonprofit Zero to Three. “We can see the huge consequences when things don’t go right in the first three years of life.”

While this idea is supported by research, it is not yet widely known, accepted or understood among families and other adults.

When Angela Keyes, an associate professor of psychiatry at Tulane University and co-director of an infant and early childhood mental health consultation program, tells people she is an infant mental health specialist, she says they often ask her, incredulously, “Infants can have mental health struggles?”

Babies remember. They just remember it differently. We remember in our brains, and they remember in their bodies.

— Meghan Schmelzer

When babies and young children experience hardship — poverty, violence, food insecurity, neglect and any number of other traumas — many adults brush it off, saying, Oh, but kids are resilient, or maybe, They’re too young to remember this.

“Babies remember,” Schmelzer corrects. “They just remember it differently. We remember in our brains, and they remember in their bodies.”

And while kids are remarkably resilient, they’re also vulnerable, she adds. An estimated 10 to 16 percent of young kids experience mental health issues, including PTSD and anxiety, Schmelzer says, referencing data from Think Babies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . For kids in poverty, the rate is more like 22 percent.

It’s not impossible for babies and toddlers to overcome these challenges — “That’s not a sentence for them,” Schmelzer says — but it takes a lot of love, support and intervention.

What Mental Health Issues Look Like in Little Kids

Without intervention and a nurturing environment, the impacts of trauma and stress can be immediate and long-lasting, explains Nancy Kelly, the mental health promotion branch chief at the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Those consequences can present in a lot of different forms, Kelly says. Some children may struggle to form attachments. They don’t want to be held, perhaps. Or they don’t want to be touched. Some children may act out. Babies may reject food or cry inconsolably. Kids who may have already been toilet trained could revert to wetting the bed or wetting themselves. Some will develop separation anxiety.

These behaviors are not wholly unlike the behaviors of an adult who is experiencing trauma or mental health challenges, Kelly points out. Adults may cry or lose their appetites. They might spend excessive amounts of time in bed, curled up in a fetal position. They may become emotionally detached from others or, the opposite, need constant connection, reassurance and attention.

Babies and young children may not be able to communicate verbally what is going on with them, but they are still communicating, Schmelzer notes.

“Behaviors that are ‘challenging’ — that’s a red flag. It’s a signal to us,” she says.

For educators and caregivers, Keyes offers a couple of examples of how children’s behaviors can signal to adults that something is up.

A little boy is new to a child care program, and each day, after his parents drop him off, he becomes distraught. Later, the teachers in his program learn that the boy had recently overheard a heated argument between his parents that made him scared. He didn’t want to be separated from them.

A toddler has become withdrawn, refusing to eat or play or participate, sometimes hiding under the table in her program. Her teachers learn that the girl has recently been placed in foster care, removed from her home and her parents. She’s experiencing attachment disruption, and everything around her — from the place where she sleeps to the people she sees to the food she eats — is unfamiliar.

What Keyes is trying to illustrate is that, while it may take some investigating on the part of the child’s caregivers, the explanations behind children’s behaviors are often knowable, she says. She often asks herself, “What is this child trying to tell me through their behavior?” The question is a prompt to find out what happened to this child instead of framing it as what is wrong with this child.

Another critical but often untapped resource in understanding what children’s behaviors are communicating? Their parents, Keyes says.

Many families would be able to tell the child’s teachers things like how a child has been eating, whether they slept well the night before, if they’re coming down with an illness, if they’re teething and whether something troubling is happening at home. But they aren’t always asked those questions. And during the pandemic, when parents were not allowed to enter the building of their child care program, let alone their child’s individual classroom, that communication channel was cut off.

Even now, Keyes says, many programs still limit who can enter certain spaces.

“We lost that ability to connect with parents, to build relationships with parents,” she says. “That has impacted our ability to get information about how a child is doing and what’s happening in their home.”

The Link Between Caregivers and Kids

Often, how a child is doing depends heavily on how their parents and caregivers are doing.

“Babies don’t live alone,” Schmelzer says. “Their caregivers’ mental health is inextricably tied to their mental health.”

Babies don’t live alone. Their caregivers’ mental health is inextricably tied to their mental health.

— Meghan Schmelzer

And caregivers’ mental health — that of both parents and early childhood educators — has declined considerably since the pandemic began three years ago.

Recent research from the Yale Child Study Center found that, a few months into the pandemic, about 46 percent of child care providers had potentially diagnosable levels of depression and 67 percent reported moderate to high stress levels.

Surveys conducted by the RAPID-EC project based out of the University of Oregon found in fall 2022 that about 42 percent of families of young children are struggling with well-being and emotional distress, which includes anxiety, depression and loneliness.

“The mental health of adults impacts the mental health of kids,” Schmelzer explains. “If parents and families are more stressed, that’s going to impact the mental health and ultimately the development of their kids.”

So the pandemic’s toll on adults is affecting children. But children also experienced their own direct impacts from the pandemic.

More than 200,000 children in the U.S. have lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID-19, and many of those children have been orphaned — a loss that will define the rest of their lives.

Over the last three years, amid program closures and quarantines, children also missed out on important opportunities to practice the skills that will set them up for a lifetime of future success: emotion regulation, tolerance for sharing and taking turns, following a schedule, transitioning to different activities.

“It was hard to get into a rhythm,” Keyes recalls of the pandemic. “Children were home with parents and not with other children. … Now what we’re seeing is a lot of mental health struggles for our youngest kiddos.”

Early Intervention

Fortunately, there are ways to help. Access to support and services for infant and early childhood mental health exists on a continuum, Schmelzer of Zero to Three explains: promotion, prevention, assessment, diagnosis and treatment.

Mental health consultation helps to address promotion and prevention by placing a mental health professional in a setting that serves infants, toddlers and young children. These settings include child care centers and in-home child care programs, pediatrician offices and families’ homes.

During mental health consultation, mental health professionals will often work with the adults who are caring for children to understand and improve policies, practices and the overall learning environment to create a more nurturing and positive space for kids, Schmelzer says.

Keyes, the psychiatry professor at Tulane, is part of a team of about 20 mental health consultants who go into child care programs across Louisiana, through a contract with the state education department. Consultants visit larger programs once a week for about four to eight hours and smaller programs every other week.

During these consultations, Keyes may observe classroom activities, work closely with the director and talk with teachers to understand how the program and individual classrooms are operating. Then she may suggest some tweaks, modeling for them different classroom strategies and behavior management.

“It’s not as rare as it used to be,” Keyes says of mental health consultation in early childhood. “More states are bringing it in. But it varies widely.”

Some places, such as Colorado, Illinois and Ohio, offer mental health consultation statewide. But Schmelzer notes that there’s an important distinction between offering it and actually having sufficient resources to meet demand. She previously was involved in infant mental health consultation in Michigan, where the program was technically statewide but had nowhere near enough position to provide services universally.

In her current position, Schmelzer is working with 13 states on how they can use American Rescue Plan dollars to expand their mental health work in early childhood.

“There has been a surge, in the last few years, of the understanding about mental health consultation as a support,” Schmelzer says.

And given the links between caregivers’ mental health and kids’ mental health, many programs are aimed at supporting both in concert. That includes the various infant and early childhood mental health programs offered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through SAMHSA, according to Kelly.

She thinks of it as similar to putting on your own oxygen mask on the airplane before helping a child with theirs — caregivers can’t really help kids with their mental health challenges until they’ve addressed their own.

“The whole portfolio is really around creating strong caregiving relationships and nurturing environments,” Kelly says, “so children can thrive.”

Source

“If you are just able to decode the words, but you don’t have the context to understand them, you’re not getting to that effective, efficient, purposeful reading for meaning,” explains Dr. Molly Ness , a reading researcher, author, and vice president of academic content at Learning Ally , a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to closing the reading gap.

Reading proficiency requires the mastery of many complex skills. From phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle to background knowledge and vocabulary, each component is integral to a reader’s ability to comprehend text. Research shows that to become proficient readers, students need early literacy instruction in both word recognition and language comprehension .

Recently, EdSurge spoke with Dr. Ness about the skills needed for reading, the most effective way to teach them and how Learning Ally’s Excite Reading can help.

The science of reading is a long-standing interdisciplinary body of knowledge that shows that to be proficient readers, kids need to be able to lift the words off the page—or decode—and then also need the language skills to understand them.

EdSurge: What does the science of reading show about the skills necessary to become a proficient reader?

Dr. Molly Ness: The science of reading is a long-standing interdisciplinary body of knowledge that shows that to be proficient readers, kids need to be able to lift the words off the page—or decode—and then also need the language skills to understand them. It shows that many interrelated literacy skills intertwine and weave into each other to produce efficient and effective reading.

What’s the difference between word recognition and language comprehension?

Word recognition is the foundational skill for a child to lift the word off the page by applying phonemic awareness. Word recognition includes instant and effortless identification of familiar words, as well as phonics knowledge that connects letter names and sounds. It involves using decoding skills to attack unfamiliar words and knowing the different types of syllables to efficiently break down and decode a multi-syllabic word.

Language comprehension is understanding the meaning behind language, as well as the meanings of words and our language structure. It includes a reader’s understanding of how text works, the use and order of words and sentences and the implied messages behind words.

The two processes of word recognition and language comprehension are not hierarchical; one does not happen after another. We don’t want to give kindergarteners lots of word recognition and overlook language comprehension because these components develop simultaneously. So, while we lay the foundations for word recognition, we must also build students’ vocabularies and background knowledge to foster comprehension.

Dr. Molly Ness | Learning Ally
Vice President of Academic Content

Why is language comprehension needed to become a proficient reader?

As proficient adult readers, we read to make meaning. We read for enjoyment and information, and we read to be a member of a literate society. All of those tasks lie in the ability to make meaning of what you’re reading. If you can decode the words, but you don’t have the context to understand them, you’re not getting to that effective, efficient, purposeful reading for meaning.

Why does phonics receive more attention than language comprehension?

My hunch is that we focus a lot on decoding because it is a finite skill; once we learn the letters and their sounds, we can check that box. We call these constrained skills because they have a finite ending and clearer progression. Language comprehension is never-ending; we’re always learning more about the world, background knowledge and vocabulary. These unconstrained skills are limitless, and it can be difficult to know where to begin instruction on something so boundless.

---

Introduction to Excite Reading

---

What’s the effect of focusing on phonics and ignoring language comprehension?

By just focusing on the lower portion of the Scarborough reading rope , the word recognition, we’re not addressing making meaning. While we may have kids who can decode, if we don’t talk about all of the sub-skills in language comprehension, we’re not really going to make a mark when we are trying to improve reading scores that focus so much on comprehension.

What’s required for effective reading instruction?

Effective reading instruction needs to be explicit in that we’re naming whatever we’re teaching and helping kids understand how it contributes to their reading. With explicit instruction, we eliminate any guesswork or lack of clarity about what has been covered. Effective instruction also transitions in clear scaffolded steps from teacher modeling to independent student practice; this transition occurs through a gradual release of responsibility . It needs to be sequential and build on itself so that there is a progression of skills. Equally important, reading instruction needs to be multi-faceted, focusing on decoding and word recognition while increasing comprehension, vocabulary and oral language.

What is Excite Reading?

Reading instruction needs to be multi-faceted, focusing on decoding and word recognition while increasing comprehension, vocabulary and oral language.

Excite Reading is a preK-2 solution that builds language comprehension. It groups texts thematically and provides explicit instruction in vocabulary from those texts. The use of text sets also builds background knowledge and funds of knowledge, which enhances comprehension. Excite Reading explicitly looks at language comprehension skills in a comprehensive way that calls on rich, diverse and engaging text. We intentionally build content knowledge in different domains of information, such as science, social studies and art. Another key element of Excite Reading is the inclusion of think-alouds, in which a teacher showcases their thinking to model comprehension for students.

How does Excite Reading support teachers in providing effective reading instruction?

Excite Reading is ready to go for teachers. Teachers will open up to lesson plans that can be a safety net. It is a comprehensive set of lesson plans grouped thematically, pulling from rich, diverse texts with lots of background knowledge and giving explicit instruction in comprehension and vocabulary, all through texts that are also connected to students’ social-emotional learning. By providing a menu of instructional choices, Excite Reading also allows teachers the flexibility to meaningfully select particular items based on their knowledge of their students and their needs.

How does Excite Reading help emergent readers?

Excite Reading helps kids early in their reading processes by exposing them to texts they will likely not be able to decode on their own. Through read-alouds and audiobooks, students interact with complex texts beyond their independent reading levels. These complex texts support their comprehension through exposure to sophisticated vocabulary and rich background knowledge.

What impact has Excite Reading had on teachers?

The feedback from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. They find that kids are thrilled about the texts and are excited to complete a text set. Teachers report that the levels of conversation they’re hearing are way beyond what they hear with different texts. Teachers also report that it has eased their workload while giving significant instructional bang for their buck in terms of what they see with student achievement.

Source