This article discusses how effective professional development has an impact on improving student learning. The author examines what "effective" professional development looks like and why it's important.

This article summarizes how one school used a blended differentiated curriculum to reduce the achievemnt gap between poor and wealthy students. What I found interesting about this approach is that the authors said, "That engagement in learning is enhanced when students' interests and choices are considered." This is a different approach to how some schools use differentiation and the change didn't happened over night. The school made a lot of adjustments, including re-writing the curriculum and setting specific learning objectives. However, they were successful because they saw an improvement in student achievement.

This article shares a intervention that was used to help close the vocabulary gap between Latino and Anglo students. A group of 5th graders were taught academically useful words along with some strategies . Those strategies include, "using information from contex, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple meanings, and from cognates to infer word meaning." The students in the the study showed greater growth in vocabuary comprehension than students who were not a part of the study group.