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The Importance of Social and Emotional Learning

Don’t Drop Finger Counting for Young Children Too Soon

Reflective Writing Exercises Can Improve Student Outcomes

Text Messaging Can Boost Grades and Attendance

The Debate on Academics vs. Play in Preschool Continues

The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.

Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.

When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.

That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.

high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.

TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.

Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.

Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.

4. Unsupported Independent Reading

5. Taking Away Recess as Punishment

5 Less-Than-Optimal Practices To help us analyze and maximize use of instructional time, here are five common literacy practices in U.S. schools that research suggests are not optimal use of instructional time:

My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.

Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.

The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.

the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.

The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.

The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)

A broad focus on testing and new standards can lead schools to neglect the individualized social and emotional needs of students, the report’s authors say.

researchers classified 55 percent of students as “engaged,” 28 percent as “not engaged,” and 17 percent as “actively disengaged.”

students surveyed in 2013 who said they strongly agreed with two statements—“My school is committed to building the strengths of each student,” and “I have at least one teacher who makes me excited about the future”—were 30 times more likely to be classified as “engaged”

Gallup recommends that principals address teacher engagement to help students succeed.

The share of workers described as "not engaged" among teachers, however, was slightly larger than it was for the general workforce—56 percent versus 52 percent.

To build engagement among teachers, the report recommends that principals ask them questions about curriculum, pedagogy, and scheduling, and incorporate their feedback into decisionmaking. School leaders should also pair engaged administrators and teachers to collaborate and generate enthusiasm for student-centered projects, the report says.

Gallup report validates that a "highly skilled principal is the linchpin to schoolwide success."

Principal behaviors that encourage collaboration and meaningful relationships "don't happen by chance," Ms. Bartoletti said in a written statement. "They emerge from a defined set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which requires dedicated and ongoing development."