ED Surge

APRIL 5, 2024

The original version of this essay was published on Medium. I detest when people talk about their dreams. It’s similar to listening to a 4-year-old tell you about their day. It takes more time than you have and never makes sense. Most of the time, I don’t even remember my dreams. Except for the rare ones that connect to real life. These dreams stick; there’s a logical glue to them that provides insight.

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Publication Schooling Teaching Physics 219

ED Surge

MARCH 27, 2024

As school boards prepare to approve their budgets for the fall, many are grappling with how to make up for the yawning chasm left by the loss of federal pandemic-relief dollars. In many cases, that means educator layoffs are coming. But the ESSER “funding cliff” — the fall deadline for districts to allocate money from the final disbursement of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief grants — isn’t a singular culprit behind the staff cuts that are rolling out around the country.

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Schooling Government Publication Elementary 230

ED Surge

MARCH 27, 2024

K-12 leaders tasked with preparing students for the future workforce are doing so amid ever-increasing cyber threats. The dynamic landscape of in-person, virtual and hybrid schooling has made schools vulnerable targets for cyber threat actors (CTAs). While many K-12 organizations struggle to obtain resources to strengthen cybersecurity, those that employ security best practices consistently report higher levels of cyber maturity.

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ED Surge

MARCH 27, 2024

During the day, I teach Algebra I classes to high school freshmen in Springfield, Missouri. One night per week, I teach preservice elementary school teachers who serve as paraprofessionals at K-12 schools in Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California through Reach University. Reach University offers adults employed in schools and other workplaces the opportunity to earn a unique bachelor’s degree that embraces work experience as part of the learning process.

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ED Surge

MARCH 26, 2024

When longtime educator Zachary Cote first read about the release of ChatGPT about 15 months ago, he says his first instinct was to be “concerned” about its impact in the classroom, worried that students might simply ask the AI tool to do work for them. He still has that concern, but as he stepped back to think about it, he also saw a way to “leverage” the tool for a goal he had long fought for — to help bring social studies education, and especially the teaching of civics, to broader prominence

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Artificial Intelligence Education Education Critical Thinking 314

ED Surge

MARCH 18, 2024

Educators often find themselves exploring innovative approaches to enhance student learning, and one particularly creative pathway is integrating games and playfulness into the learning environment. Navigating this terrain requires a delicate balance, ensuring that the joy and engagement of games enhance rather than detract from educational objectives while aiming to foster an inclusive and responsive pedagogy.

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ED Surge

MARCH 18, 2024

Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and exploded into public discourse, the emergence of generative AI tools has been met with both excitement and concern, across virtually every industry, ideology and age group. Today, the use of this technology in education settings is underway, and states are even beginning to release guidance on how to navigate AI in schools.

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Education Education Publication Communications 330

ED Surge

MARCH 4, 2024

The national average rate of chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools has significantly increased in recent years. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 14.7 million students, or 29.7 percent of the student population, were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. Early data from the 2022-23 school year indicates minor improvement, with 27.85 percent of the student population being chronically absent.

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Economics Publication Elementary Communications 136

ED Surge

MARCH 1, 2024

In summer 2012, my life changed. I was a 20-year-old college student with a bright future. I was fearless and ready to take the world by storm. All of my hopes and dreams came crashing down when I began experiencing what felt like a black curtain within my field of vision in my right eye. I went to my eye doctor and learned I was suffering from a retinal detachment that required surgery.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Most teachers who work in education today have studied — or at least are familiar with — VARK , a learning theory first introduced by Neil Fleming in 1987. VARK suggests that students can best accelerate their knowledge acquisition via one of four core learning styles: visual (V), aural (A), read/write (R) or kinesthetic (K). It’s a wildly popular concept that has led to prevailing beliefs that students perform better if we cater to their natural learning styles.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Everett Anderson was determined to become a teacher. It had always been his plan, and he had no reason to doubt it: He’d earned a full scholarship to college and acceptance into a leadership program designed to attract and retain Black male teachers. This story also appeared in USA Today. There was just one problem. Even as Anderson excelled in his coursework at Jackson State University, he struggled to pass one of the licensure tests required in Mississippi to gain full admittance into the teac

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

While the mental health of students remains a top concern of many in the education field, federal data reveals that it’s not all bad news. Or at the very least, not getting worse in all areas and potentially improving in some. The National Center for Education Statistics released its biennial Crime, Violence, Discipline, and Safety in U.S. Public Schools report covering the 2021-22 academic year.

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Schooling Accessibility Elementary Publication 297

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Three young trees stood in a schoolyard, their branches reaching out for the sun, casting stripes of shade on the newly seeded grass below. With each passing day, two of them grew stronger, taller, thicker. Their deep roots built pathways that strengthened their foundation to grow. Yet while two of the young trees flourished, one did not. One young tree felt farther and farther from the sun as her peers grew stronger around her.

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Publication Schooling Government Problem Solving 328

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Zachary Jackson thinks a lot about what his students may be learning from him in class. For some of his first graders in Atlanta, that goes beyond the actual academic lessons. They are also practicing how to be a man. For Jackson, the question of how to model manhood is an obsession, something he thinks about all the time. He’s worked with kids since 2018 through Wings for Kids, a nonprofit that operates after-school programs in Georgia and South Carolina.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

When Chat GPT-4 came out, Cory Kohn was itching to bring it into the classroom. A biology laboratory coordinator in an integrated science department at Claremont McKenna, Pitzer and Scripps Colleges, Kohn perceived the tool as useful. It promised to increase efficiency, he argued. But more than that, it would be important to teach his science students how to interact with the tool for their own careers, he first told EdSurge last April.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

“I think I’m talking to Salinger. Can I ask?” My student stood next to my desk, computer resting on both hands, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. We were wrapping up our end-of-book project for “The Catcher in the Rye,” which involved students interviewing a character chatbot designed to mimic the personality and speaking style of Holden Caulfield.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

As I drove down the lengthy driveway of Mercy Montessori Center, I called my great aunt from Athens, Georgia, whom we lovingly call Aunt Puddien. Aunt Puddien is like another mother to me and I trusted her wisdom. She always introduced me to a relative or friend of the family as the teacher to which they responded with praise and affirmation. To them, loving and teaching our youth was a great honor despite the devaluation educators often experience.

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ED Surge

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

Schools need to tap into the same sense of wonder that led early humans to seek unifying stories to explain their place in the world — and teachers need to do more to incorporate myths, jokes and riddles into curriculum and teaching practices, from the earliest grades up through high school. That’s the argument of Kieran Egan, a Canadian philosopher and longtime professor at Simon Fraser University who passed away in 2022.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 30, 2024

Teachers may spend their days confidently addressing a room full of squirming or distracted students. But when it comes to having a chat with parents, these same teachers may get so nervous they avoid the interactions. “Many teachers that I have talked to don't like to call parents,” says Crystal Frommert, a middle school math teacher at a private school in Houston.

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Technology Communications Teaching Schooling 268

ED Surge

JANUARY 24, 2024

If you’re reading this, you might have AI anxiety. A recent survey from EY research shows that 71 percent of employees with knowledge of artificial intelligence are concerned about it. Considering how AI has rapidly entered education conversations, teachers and administrators are certainly represented in this statistic. Feelings of AI anxiety are valid for a technology that brings so much change and uncertainty.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 23, 2024

Will AI literacy soon become as important a subject to teach in schools as reading, writing and math? Many education leaders think so, as ChatGPT and other new generative AI tools sweep into daily life. After all, it’s not every day that a technology comes along that is widely compared to the printing press in terms of how influential it could be. And there is an emerging push to bring AI literacy to schools and colleges.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 19, 2024

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education reported that Black educators make up approximately 9 percent of the teacher workforce , of which a majority are Black women. A group that is often studied but left out of conversations, we wanted to intentionally facilitate spaces for Black women across and outside the gender spectrum and learn more about their experiences in this climate, as much recent research covers pre-pandemic educator experiences.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 19, 2024

Students have different reasons for enrolling in university and in pushing to complete their degree. A deeper understanding of their motivating factors can help universities adjust communications with future prospective students, as well as inform additional services they can provide to ensure that students are successful while in university through to graduation.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 16, 2024

When teachers think their students aren’t paying attention in class, they’re probably right. And that’s true even when instructors force students to put away their smartphones. That’s what Georgetown University professor Jeanine Turner found in her research about how tech has shaped social relationships. Her argument is that our internet-connected devices have changed the way people relate to others, even when devices are temporarily removed.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 9, 2024

Perhaps it’s no surprise that EdSurge’s most popular podcast episode of 2023 focused on ChatGPT. In fact, three of our top 10 episodes of the year explored various aspects of how new forms of artificial intelligence are impacting teaching and learning. In what has become an annual tradition, we’re sharing your favorite episodes of the year, as determined by the number of listens to the 44 fresh episodes we produced.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 5, 2024

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT became publicly available in November 2022, the field of higher education has been focusing on its impact and applications — faculty want to understand how this will shape their work and the student experience. Largely missing from many conversations, however, is a discussion of how scientific approaches may be used to study ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in the context of higher ed.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 3, 2024

One of the greatest challenges schools and districts face is low parent engagement. Often, the assumption is that parents don’t make time to engage with their child’s learning community or do not care about their student’s academic progress — even if that student is performing poorly or below academic expectations. It is the school’s responsibility to ensure that children are learning, but learning extends beyond school walls.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 3, 2024

Let the countdown commence! We’re bringing you a roundup of the higher ed stories EdSurge published in 2023 that were most popular with you, our readers. As these headlines show, college is in flux. Administrators, professors and students are rethinking nearly everything about how higher education works. It starts with the very basics — like whether it even makes sense anymore to measure learning in credit hours — and builds up to future-facing conundrums about how to handle the sudden ubiquity

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 22, 2023

Unlike many people in the country, Lindsey Henderson was thrilled by what she saw in the latest international test scores. A secondary mathematics specialist for the Utah State Board of Education, Henderson was asked to interpret the results of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, for the state. When there’s positive results about Utah that her bosses want to put out, they will get advanced notice, she says, and so she got a tap on the shoulder to check out the PISA results

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 22, 2023

This year has seen ample debate about the value and fairness of colleges prioritizing diversity among the students they serve. New research suggests one way to consider the question: by looking at how the mix of students in a given course affects their grades. A study published in the journal AERA Open found that students earn better marks in college STEM courses when those classrooms have higher percentages of students who are underrepresented racial minorities or the first in their families to

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 22, 2023

Although digital technologies hold great promise in the realm of education, access remains limited for many communities worldwide. Endless Network , a global organization committed to addressing equity gaps stemming from challenges such as inadequate internet access, strategically directs investments towards international companies that share their mission and actively contribute to its realization.

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 20, 2023

I believe that my experience with students inside the classroom informs, to a great measure, the work that I do today as a school diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) leader. A teacher at heart who values community, I often reflect on my past experiences with students and the ways we explored, celebrated and protected our cultural identity. While there are opportunities to do this within the academic curriculum, my Black students’ cultural identity is often reflected in how they wear and style

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 8, 2023

As the college essay program manager for Write the World, a nonprofit writing organization for teens, I oversee a group of advisers who guide students through the essay writing process. I have seen firsthand the anxiety that students experience when it comes to writing their college essays. Many of the students we serve say they lack confidence in writing their college essay, sharing that they feel uneasy and unprepared.

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Creativity Critical Thinking Primary Construction 222

ED Surge

DECEMBER 7, 2023

A white male student in Kansas shouted a racial epithet and shoved and punched a Black female student. Two Iowa lawsuits accuse school districts of failing to protect their children from harassment. A Nevada community protests the expulsion of a Black student who was attacked by her classmates. All these recent events give details to data compiled by the federal government on discipline and harassment in U.S. public schools.

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ED Surge

DECEMBER 5, 2023

Janae Montgomery has walked the halls of the same school building for much of the last 10 years — first as a high school student, then as a paraprofessional and, as of a few months ago, as a special education teacher. Montgomery’s education and training experience had its share of detours but ultimately led her back to a career that she’d picked out for herself long ago, and which she feels she is especially well suited for.

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Math Teaching Schooling Education 241

ED Surge

NOVEMBER 20, 2023

When you’re not sure where you’ll sleep, showing up to class isn’t what you’re worried about. For educators, this makes for a daunting test. “When families are dealing with not having basic necessities, school just isn’t a priority,” says Susanne Terry, coordinator for homeless education services in the San Diego County Office of Education. It’s worse for students who move around a lot, she says.

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ED Surge

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

In 1998, I began my journey as an elementary teacher under the tutelage of my aunt and revered educator, Marva N. Collins. My mother was also a teacher, so I saw firsthand what it meant to be a passionate educator who is deeply committed to students. Their commitment and passion for teaching were the reasons why I chose this profession. After watching them devote time and energy to their craft, I entered the profession with enthusiasm and excitement, not knowing what the next 25 years would brin

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