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Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

VHS Learning Supports Students’ College and Career Readiness via Expanded Catalog and New “Exploring College & Careers” Infographic

Boston – April 14, 2022 – Giving students the chance to explore subjects beyond those in a standard core high school curriculum is a crucial step in readying them for college and careers. Students taking online high school courses through VHS Learning will start the 2022-2023 school year with many unique for-credit options, from Python Programming to Law, thanks to the nonprofit’s newly expanded course catalog. These new courses add to the more than 300 courses already available.

VHS Learning’s new courses for the 2022-2023 academic year include the following:

  • AP® Chinese Language and Culture
  • Business Law
  • Career Exploration and Readiness
  • Chinese 3
  • Civics and U.S. Government
  • Law and the U.S. Legal System
  • Python Programming
  • Spanish 1 Credit Recovery
  • Spanish 1 Summer
  • Studio Art
  • Veterinary Medicine

AP® Chinese Language and Culture runs 33 weeks, while the other new courses are semester-length and run for 15 weeks. These new courses enable students to discover subject areas that might not otherwise be available to them at a high school level.…Read More

10 SEL activities for high school students

Between balancing core instruction, administering assessments, grading homework, and ensuring students are prepared for college and career, high school teachers have a lot on their plates. SEL activities can make your jobs easier!

When students have strong social and emotional skills, they are more motivated, engaged, and understand the value of their learning. SEL also helps reduce disruptive behavior and office referrals, which allows teachers to spend more time on their instruction. Additionally, SEL activities can improve high school students’ college and career readiness and help them set goals for life after high school.

It’s easy to integrate SEL activities in your core instruction! Here are 10 activities and lesson ideas for high school students–organized by subject area–to get you started.…Read More

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16 college and career readiness resources

College and career readiness should start early to help students develop growth mindsets and outline goals for their personal success. With students coming from different backgrounds and socio-economic situations, one path doesn’t fit all.

College readiness and access is often difficult, and students aren’t always sure how to embark upon their chosen career path. COVID-19 made college and career readiness more complicated for some students who chose to delay their postsecondary plans during the pandemic due to health, safety, family, and financial concerns.

Here are a handful of college and career readiness resources and tools to help educators at all levels inspire their students to pursue their academic and career goals.…Read More

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CAE Presents Case For Authentic Assessment To Improve Student Outcomes At Beyond Multiple Choice Seminar

Experts in performance-based assessment share research on student engagement and effort

June 3, 2021, NEW YORK – The Council for Aid to Education, Inc. (CAE), a nonprofit developer of performance-based and custom assessments that authentically measure students’ essential college and career readiness skills, recently presented “Leveraging Performance Tasks to Assess College Readiness”, at “Assessment Challenges of Our New Decade” hosted by Beyond Multiple Choice. An international community of education and training-industry stakeholders committed to exploring, innovating, and implementing the future of assessment, Beyond Multiple Choice drew hundreds of attendees from around the world, explored urgent challenges confronting the future of assessment, and shared expert visions, plans, and tools to address them.

According to Beyond Multiple Choice, assessments have come increasingly under fire over the past decade, with critics claiming they are overused, inequitably applied, and not aligned with optimal outcomes for training and education. The challenges of COVID-19 highlighted already existing perceptions of assessment deficiencies.…Read More

CAE And Centerpoint Education Solutions Collaborate To Support Mutual College And Career Readiness Goals

Nonprofits will seek opportunities to ensure assessments and curricula measure and teach essential skills most important to secondary and higher education students and institutions

May 18, 2021, NEW YORK – The Council for Aid to Education, Inc. (CAE), a nonprofit developer of performance-based and custom assessments that authentically measure students’ essential college and career readiness skills, announced a collaboration with CenterPoint Education Solutions, a nonprofit organization that provides aligned curriculum, assessment, and professional learning solutions to empower educators to help students succeed. 

The like-minded nonprofit organizations will share ideas and key learnings, identifying ways to meet the needs of today’s states, districts, schools and students. Tying CenterPoint’s’ data literacy services to CAE’s assessment approaches offers mutual clients innovative solutions to address potential learning gaps.…Read More

5 ways to honor students’ time and advance equity in a post-pandemic world

If our goal is to accelerate learning for those most impacted by the pandemic, we must make the most of the time that we have. We’ve known since TNTP’s The Opportunity Myth study that, all too often, only a quarter of students’ time in their classes is spent on activities that are moving them sufficiently toward college and career readiness. Simply doing more of what we did before the pandemic will not get us where we need to be as we seek to recover from it. 

We actually know a lot about how to make the most of learning time: Create a climate in which students feel safe taking risks and offering up their ideas; make lessons meaningful, culturally relevant, and varied so students remain engaged; anticipate and prepare to address student confusions before teaching; give lots of opportunities for guided and independent practice; provide timely and precise feedback on their work; and reteach specific skills as soon as possible when they struggle and use this data to inform future lessons.  

And, most of all, make sure students are engaging in grade-level work—every day.   …Read More

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Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center Named 2021 CODiE Award Finalist for Best College & Career Readiness Solution

Infobase, esteemed provider of the Infobase Media Cloud and the Infobase Learning Cloud, today announced that Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center was named a 2021 SIIA CODiE Award finalist in the “Best College & Career Readiness Solution” category. CODiE Award finalists represent applications, products, and services from developers of educational software, digital content, online learning services, and related technologies across the PreK–20 sector.

Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center is a vital college and career readiness resource with unparalleled range and depth of information. Users in middle school continuing all the way through adulthood will find valuable and actionable information for their professional lives. Whether users are looking to assess their career goals and interests, plan their education, explore professions, learn workplace skills, find apprenticeships and internships, or conduct a job search, Ferguson’s delivers the appropriate experience. 

The database’s wealth of proprietary content includes hundreds of video interviews with working professionals and directories of apprenticeships and internships that can’t be found anywhere else. Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center also features a fully responsive, mobile-friendly platform, with improved accessibility that includes a new VPAT to ensure a comfortable user experience for all users. It was built with 21st-century trends in careers, education, and employment top of mind. It is an excellent starting point and an excellent touch point to come back to over time, as users’ interests, goals, and personal needs change.…Read More

National Study Shows Online Literacy Engagement Minimizes COVID Slide

A real-time national education study of more than one million students by two leading not-for-profit education groups has found that continued engagement with technology-enabled instruction during COVID-19 school closures has significantly reduced students’ loss of potential reading growth. The Successful Practices Network (SPN) and the Center for College and Career Readiness (CCCR) released these findings today, which are some of the very first published results using current data of students’ learning from Fall 2020. Recommendations to help educators accelerate learning are also included in the new study.

This unique analysis draws its finding from actual usage and performance data for students using Achieve3000 Literacy™ before and after schools closed on March 11 through September 30, 2020. Data for more than 1 million students using Achieve3000 Literacy, an online solution for differentiated and personalized literacy instruction in Grades 2-12, during the 2019 and 2020 school years, demonstrates:

Students Lost Only 12% of Potential Learning Gains…Read More

CAE Partners with Education Research and Development Institute

Council for Aid to Education, Inc. (CAE), a leading provider of performance-based, authentic assessments measuring essential college and career readiness skills, announced it joined the Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI). Partnering with the well-respected 35-year-old organization, CAE will contribute as a thought leader and work collaboratively to develop insights that will inform the evolution of its student-centric educational solutions and services.

“We are honored to partner with ERDI whose members comprise our country’s top education practice leaders committed to ensuring all students have access to the highest quality learning experiences,” said Bob Yayac, president and CEO of CAE. “Joining ERDI’s community allows CAE to leverage the latest in PK-12 research and on-the-ground experience to best meet the needs of students today and into the future.”

ERDI gathers top PK-12 education leaders and solutions providers from more than 250 school districts across the U.S. who are focused on the continuous improvement of public education, to analyze, discuss, and propose solutions for current problems of practice in education.…Read More

We Stand Together: Finding a Better Way to End Racial Inequity Starts Today

In the midst of protests across the country driven by the death of unarmed Black Americans George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, K12 Inc.—the nation’s leading provider of online and blended education—is committing to a series of initiatives that support racial and socioeconomic equity and inclusion in and through education.

Since its inception twenty years ago, K12 has been committed to removing barriers that impact academic equity and to providing high-quality education for anyone—particularly those in underserved communities —as a means to foster economic empowerment and address societal inequities through college and career readiness.  The company’s new pledge and continued support of racial equality and justice are consistent with this commitment.

“At K12, we support eliminating racism, prejudice, and violence in all forms and against all groups,” said K12 CEO Nate Davis. “As a community of educators, we believe that Black Lives Matter, and that K12 teachers, administrators, and management must serve as a role model for children, parents, and families.  Only through sustained actions can we strive to create real change.  It’s my hope that our continued efforts to bridge the differences that divide our communities will help build a better, stronger, more inclusive nation.”…Read More