A Principal's Reflections

DECEMBER 22, 2010

The success of the Tri-State Educational Technology Conference (TSETC) held here this fall played a huge role in this movement. Making our course offerings more rigorous and relevant in the 21 st Century.

Education 195

Education Tradition Leadership Cultures 195

ED Surge

MARCH 5, 2024

Ken Futernick brings together people who disagree deeply on issues that are most dividing school communities these days — such as teaching about gender and sexual identity or about the history of racism in America. I became distressed about these so-called ‘culture wars’ erupting all over the place. And he records the conversations.

Cultures 128

Cultures Elementary School Teaching History 128

ED Surge

DECEMBER 11, 2024

Lunchtime at high school in the United States is an experience so culturally ingrained that I would wager every person who went through this school system has a vivid image of what it entails; some of the cliches that come to mind are food fights, awkward journeys across the cafeteria or eating lunch alone in the bathroom.

K-12 103

K-12 Cultures High School History 103

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Black Futures Afrofuturism reimagines Black history through art, music and cultural practices, acknowledging the past, present and future of Blackness. It is all a labor of love an enormous amount of time is put into designing the curriculum, examining pedagogy and making sure that we remain culturally responsive.

Pedagogy 94

Pedagogy High School Cultures History 94

ED Surge

APRIL 29, 2022

As workplaces, schools can intentionally structure systems and provide resources that decrease some of these barriers, such as addressing the scarcity of dedicated services and supporting educators through convoluted insurance hurdles that make it even harder to seek professional help. Even hailing from vastly different corners of the U.S.,

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Cultures Education Elementary School High School 120

ED Surge

JUNE 17, 2022

In order to create the systemic changes required to realize racial justice, we must transform ourselves into students and recommit to learning how our shared history influences modern practices. My organization, Facing History and Ourselves, and many others have been doing this necessary work.

History 100

History Teaching Civics Civic Engagement 100

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Social studies and history classes weren't just academic discourse, they were social and emotional experiences. Like many people who learned new skills during the pandemic, I immersed myself in Black history, pedagogy, and education reform. I first acknowledged it subconsciously in my middle school years.

History 107

History Tutoring Pedagogy American History 107

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 24, 2025

Since the growth of generative AI, we have made some updates to our framework, but theyve been minimal because were trying hard to keep it focused on student skills and not tie it to specific technologies. At Gwinnett, we have a history of preparing students for their futures in innovative and meaningful ways.

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K-12 Public School Leadership Teaching 95

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 20, 2025

The Sea Islands experiment, as it was known, marked a positive moment in the fraught history of Black education, notes education law expert Derek W. When we talk about the history of slavery, it is always the Souths insistence that its ability to deal with slavery was beyond federal reach.

Education 70

Education Government Public School History 70

ED Surge

MARCH 1, 2023

At the beginning of this school year, I facilitated a professional development (PD) session with middle school teachers about how to use education technology tools for deeper learning. Based on this assignment, one could argue that my college history class transcended the surface-level exploration endemic to most lessons in school.

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Education Library History American History 127

ED Surge

JULY 14, 2023

When my class wrote a book last year about artifacts of New Orleans culture and what they mean to them, a third of the class wrote about food. Despite inheriting this culinary and cultural legacy, my students find themselves in a tough position during the school day for breakfast and lunch.

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Cultures Artifacts Charter School Library 77

ED Surge

JANUARY 11, 2023

Everett Collection/Shutterstock At the same time, I also recognize that my privileged experience in Hawaiʻi was forged by settler culture , the effects of which still persist in the state educational system. Conversely, I also have settler students who push back and say “it is not their culture.”

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Ancestry Heritage Cultures History 135

ED Surge

JANUARY 13, 2022

ótiyapi was at the center of our knowledge, our culture and our way of life as Lakota people. In many of our conversations, we acknowledged how our ways greatly differed from the ways of knowing and learning found in mainstream education systems. ótiyapi and the values embedded within that language.

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Teaching Education Cultures Tradition 145

Digital Promise

MAY 13, 2021

Online Teaching, Technology, and Learner Variability : Teachers with a high degree of comfort with technology are significantly less likely than others to say the pandemic has worsened their ability to work with each student’s individual learner variability.

Teaching 137

Teaching EdTech K-12 Professional Development 137

ED Surge

APRIL 4, 2022

Depending on how you look at it, Ed Secretary Miguel Cardona’s assertion that “we’re closer to a reset in education than ever before” is either a beacon of hope at the end of a long, dark tunnel, or the opening of a new front in an increasingly polarizing culture war. One possible answer is investing in more inclusive partnerships.

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Education Tutoring Cultures Leadership 142

ED Surge

OCTOBER 11, 2023

As of 2022, 38 states required a semester of civics education in high school; that same year, the federal government increased spending on “American History and Civics” fourfold. These are all great steps in the right direction, but I believe there is still a lack of respect for the importance of history and civics education.

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Civics Education Civic Engagement K-12 127

ED Surge

JUNE 17, 2024

Postman explained the importance of memory in a culture without writing, but how in a culture with writing, memory is considered a waste of time. The television person values immediacy, not history. The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs.

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EdTech Humanities Cultures Teaching 145

ED Surge

MARCH 19, 2024

And one of the things that she's found is that in a study done at Stanford, she took over a small room in the computer science department and in one condition, she populated this room with these artifacts of geeky masculine culture, like a Star Trek poster and Diet Coke cans. Kids who are misbehaving are threatening to that.

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Research Psychology K-12 Artifacts 140

ED Surge

MAY 5, 2023

Relationships are critical in engaging students and families in meaningful and culturally appropriate ways, and are associated with increased literacy acquisition, lower dropout rates and improved attendance. Encouraging teachers to collaborate, coach and mentor others can also improve climate, culture and retention.

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Social Justice Leadership Professional Development Cultures 145

ED Surge

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Cultivating a Culture One day during my English class, Khalil, one of my sixth grade students, created a live soundtrack to accompany my lesson on mentor sentences. The combination of our classroom culture and reading growth achievement earned our class the 2018 Southwest Ohio Teach For America Classroom of the Year Award.

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Cultures Humanities Leadership Teaching 132

ED Surge

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

“For the last few decades, educational reform has been coasting on these outdated ideas about human nature, about human psychology and human society,” says Hendrickson. You can't have a culture without having metaphors. You can't have a culture without having songs and dances and rituals.

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K-12 Education Psychology Humanities 136

ED Surge

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

Sports and Culturally Responsive Teaching My school sits just six miles from the border with Mexico, and many of my students cross that border daily to attend school in the United States. Our students have rich, cultural lives and dynamic insight into their passions.

Cultures 130

Cultures Pedagogy Elementary School Teaching 130

ED Surge

JULY 21, 2022

Dear Bonni, I'll be teaching a course on the history of Ireland later this year. Seeing as how art has been such a big part of Irish history and culture, I was thinking about something artistic in some way, but how on earth do I grade something creative? What do I do? I feel weird about testing them on genocide.”

Primary Sources 125

Primary Sources History World History Digital Resources 125

ED Surge

JUNE 1, 2022

Autumn Rivera, 2022 Colorado Teacher of the Year, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in April. The educators were state winners of the Teacher of the Year program , hosted annually by the Council of Chief State School Officers. They taught Welch that history is made up of “little moments” in people’s lives.

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Museum Education Historic Sites History 140

Digital Promise

JANUARY 19, 2016

Educational technology (edtech for short) can play a significant role in mitigating and solving this growing dilemma. Many school districts -- including mine in Middletown, NY-- are leveraging the power of technology with adaptive assessments and instructional software. Third, know how to generate buy-in from schools.

EdTech 89

EdTech Pedagogy Educational Technology Cultures 89

ED Surge

OCTOBER 11, 2022

A little over 50 years ago, a student teacher in Minneapolis hit upon a novel idea to engage his eighth grade American history class in a unit on westward expansion. In that moment, a previously tedious history unit came to life. In fact, the phrase ‘You Have Died of Dysentery’ survives as a cultural meme today.

American History 117

American History History Cultures Education 117

ED Surge

DECEMBER 5, 2022

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist and learning scientist at UC Irvine. She’s been sharing her observations with EdSurge readers for nearly a decade now, reflecting on young people’s interest-driven and playful engagements as they relate to education. EdSurge: How have you seen the field of game-based learning evolve?

Civics 128

Civics Cultures Tradition History 128

ED Surge

JANUARY 17, 2023

Lander teaches history and civics at this large public school in Massachusetts, and she says one of the most important strategies is to find ways to bring out her students’ stories in the classroom. “And They come from about 30 different countries, including the Republic of Congo and Cambodia.

Teaching 118

Teaching Civics History Public School 118

ED Surge

MARCH 26, 2024

That, he hopes, can bring about a shift in focus, from teaching content in subjects like history to teaching critical thinking skills that students can apply to any set of information they encounter. Cote is not alone in pinning hopes on AI to help the teaching of civics. “We

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Civics Controversial Topics Education Social Studies 134

ED Surge

SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

My colleague and I teach the same group of 11th grade students in our Title I high school in Oakland; she teaches history, and I teach them science. Before the notorious Zoom Year, phones were a minor issue; students were generally receptive to being redirected and there was an overall culture of understanding of how to act in a classroom.

Teaching 122

Teaching Cultures High School History 122

ED Surge

DECEMBER 20, 2023

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 their hair.

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K-12 Cultures Government Tradition 111

ED Surge

MAY 24, 2023

In the wake of the Atlanta Spa shootings and a surge in violence against Asian Americans throughout the pandemic, Illinois made history by becoming the first state to mandate that Asian American history be taught in public K-12 schools beginning in the 2022-23 school year. Let’s get them to recognize there is an absence.”

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Inclusive Curriculum American History Primary Sources Professional Development 104

ED Surge

JUNE 6, 2023

This is a thought that recurs throughout history — this question of how do we tell what's real? Lots of little kids play around with the boundaries between reality and dreams, reality and make believe, in just the way that philosophers have throughout history. And Rex isn't uncommon. And Rex isn't uncommon.

Teaching 145

Teaching History Middle School Tradition 145

ED Surge

MARCH 8, 2022

But a flurry of other bills and laws restricting what educators can teach—or even say—about history, literature, race, sexuality and other topics are alive and well. Meanwhile in Indiana, a bill would have required teachers to turn in a year’s worth of lesson plans in advance. Both failed to pass their respective state legislatures.

Lesson Plan 120

Lesson Plan K-12 History Professional Development 120

ED Surge

OCTOBER 3, 2023

The external forces have to do with the conversation that the culture is having about cancellation, about what authors are OK, about what books are OK and what content is OK. And this seeps into the college culture within the context of a classroom. They might have been in AP African American history.

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K-12 Pedagogy American History History 111

ED Surge

JANUARY 17, 2024

Students want to be connected, cultured and aware of the realities beyond the classroom. For me, a Spanish course is more than grammar structures; it is about connection, cultural competency and global engagement. What we cultivate in the classroom eventually ends up impacting the entire culture of our school.

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Heritage Humanities Economics Cultures 118

ED Surge

DECEMBER 12, 2022

We talked with educators who immigrated as children to the U.S., We talked with folks who strongly identify with their heritage ancestry, language and culture and others who navigate the complex nuances of diasporic reality. After the anti-Asian spa shootings in Atlanta, Asian Americans and supporters rallied in Washington, D.C.,

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K-12 Ancestry Education Geography 143