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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.

How our school is reimagining math education

At Scott Elementary School, our approach to education is defined as GAIN (Growth in Academics through Innovation and Neuroeducation), which includes multiple initiatives to ensure each student reaches their maximum potential. Our focus is to inspire a love for learning and prepare students to be successful throughout every stage of their lives.

Indiana is one of that states that has not adopted Common Core State Standards. Similar to the Common Core standards in other states, we focus on developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills that students need to be successful. Our view is that the real power to learn rests with the learner. My role is to seek out ways to engage this power within each child to optimize their opportunities in life.

My corporation strives to educate the whole child by integrating academics with social and emotional learning. We inspire students’ desire to learn by making them feel important, leading by example, praising their successes, and developing their confidence.…Read More

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STEMscopes Math Receives Top Rating from Learning List for Alignment to Common Core State Standards for Grades K-5

HOUSTON – July 14, 2021 – STEMscopes Math from Accelerate Learning has received the highest rating from Learning List for alignment to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Mathematical Practices for grades K-5. Published this month, Learning List’s new, independent review of STEMscopes Math includes a standard-by-standard review of the alignment of material for grades K-2, a review of the product’s instructional quality, and a review of its technology compatibility. In March of 2021, Learning List completed and published its review of STEMscopes Math for grades 3-5.

STEMscopes Math is a core mathematics program for grades K-5. It combines digital, print, and kit components to provide teachers with everything they need to create meaningful math learning experiences for students. The curriculum is available in English and Spanish, and it can be used in the classroom, distance learning, and hybrid learning settings.

STEMscopes Math incorporates the 5E plus Intervention and Acceleration lesson model, the Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) approach, intentional discourse, and real-world exploration to provide a fresh approach to math instruction. From hands-on, inquiry-based math investigations to career connections to current events stories, it bridges the gap between the classroom and real world, and brings meaning and context to the math concepts and skills students are learning.…Read More

Savvas Learning Company’s enVision Mathematics Honored with Gold Stevie Award

Nationally recognized curriculum earns distinction for best “Mathematics Instructional Solution”

PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY — May 19, 2021 — Savvas Learning Company, a K-12 next-generation learning solutions leader, is proud to announce that its enVision® Mathematics Common Core ©2020/2021 Grades K-8 received a Gold Stevie® Award in The 19th Annual American Business Awards®, with judges hailing it as “a great solution” with projects that “bring math to children in ways that make sense to them and encourage their efforts to learn.”

“We are so pleased that enVision Mathematics has won this prestigious award,” said Bethlam Forsa, CEO of Savvas Learning Company. “Teaching with high-quality instructional materials has a direct impact on student learning outcomes. With its adaptive learning and differentiated instructional design, enVision provides an innovative and engaging curriculum with extensive customization options to empower teachers and increase student achievement.”…Read More

Savvas Announces its enVision® Mathematics Common Core Grades 6-8 © 2021 Earns Highest Rating from EdReports

Savvas Learning Company, a next-generation learning solutions leader for K-12 education, is proud to announce that its enVision® Mathematics Common Core Grades 6-8 © 2021 received the highest rating from EdReports.org. With this latest designation, the nation’s most popular math program has earned “All-Green” ratings for the entire enVision Common Core K-12 series.

EdReports — the highly regarded, independent nonprofit designed to improve education by providing reviews of K-12 instructional materials — applies evidence-based analysis in evaluating math and ELA programs. By giving “All-Green” ratings to each of the products in the enVision Common Core K-12 line, EdReports has determined that the full math series consistently delivers high-quality, standards-aligned instructional material across all grade levels.

“We appreciate EdReports for recognizing the high-quality of our entire enVision K-12 math series,” said Savvas Learning Company CEO Bethlam Forsa. “Teaching with high-quality instructional materials has a direct impact on student learning outcomes. With its adaptive learning and innovative instructional design, enVision provides educators the high-quality curriculum they are looking for to increase both student engagement and achievement.”…Read More

What is Obama’s K-12 education legacy?

Common Core, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—just a few top-down, often-controversial, metrics-heavy K-12 reform initiatives favored by the Obama Administration that seemed to have a lot more traction during the President’s first-term with Education Secretary Arne Duncan at the helm than during the second term.

“President Barack Obama will perhaps be best remembered for what many considered a top-down approach to education reform, and Arne Duncan was the architect of that strategy,” writes Tara Garcia Mathewson for EducationDIVE. From a strong support of Common Core to even the ESSA, “a strict emphasis on standards is one of the biggest marks of the administration.”

[For the higher education version of this story, click here.]…Read More

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New $5M project will study impact of Common Core

A new $4.9 million project will examine how stakeholders from the government and other sectors are responding to the Common Core State Standards, and how those responses are impacting classroom instruction and social disparities in academic achievement in school districts across the nation.

Funding for the first phase of the five-year Common Core analysis was awarded researchers from the University of Michigan, Brown University and Stanford University from the Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.

Among the data that will be used in the study is a collection of video records of classroom teaching from roughly 240 teachers in six urban school districts that participated in the Measures of Effective Teaching project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.…Read More

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Encourage critical thinking by turning your class into a Socratic Seminar

With so much talk about the Common Core standards and truly increasing our student’s argumentative powers and critical thinking skills, some teachers are starting to think critically themselves about how best to engage students in thoughtful debate and discussion around texts they need to analyze anyway.

One method, called the Socratic seminar, challenges to students to formal discussions about a text based on open-ended questions. Throughout the exercise, students must alternately employ good listening, critical thinking, creativity, and rhetorical prowess.

The Socratic style of discourse lends itself quite well to establishing critical thinkers due to the fact that Socrates believed that enabling students to think for themselves was more important than filling their heads with knowledge. Even if you’re new to the concept, it’s easy to get started.…Read More

Free learning platform targets improved media literacy

KQED Teach, which launched on July 11, provides a series of free, self-paced courses to help K-12 educators develop the media skills necessary to bring media production and communication to their learning environments.

These courses will take place in an online platform developed by KQED Education that tracks user progress and encourages sharing and feedback through an integrated social community.

KQED Teach participants will have access to a wide range of social media and digital media tools allowing them to construct and remix media in multiple formats and across a variety of platforms while addressing many writing, reading, speaking and listening skills required by both the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards.…Read More

The best BYOD tech tools for the Common Core classroom

With just 4 categories and less than a dozen tools, educators can hit a lot of Common Core standards

I recently had the pleasure of spending a few hours in a friend’s classroom where I introduced her students to technology applications that would engage them in “showing what they know” at different points in their learning. Having worked with this teacher for many years, I had always considered her a technology pioneer.

So it came as something of a surprise when, planning for our time together, she confided in me that she no longer felt empowered by technology so much as overwhelmed by it. Looking back, it’s easy to see how this could have happened.

When our new wireless network went live early last year, the choice of which applications and technologies to use was no longer limited by bandwidth issues. Our Board of Education then announced we were now a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) district, but did not provide the professional development time to support this initiative. My friend was overwhelmed by the plethora of tools available. She needed guidance on selection and advice in where the potholes were in introducing these tools to her students. She knew enough to know there are always “snags” when technology gets introduced, but no longer felt confident in navigating those snags.…Read More

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Can you teach students to think more like entrepreneurs?

Teaching students the skills they need to become leaders and innovators is more important than ever

When you think of imparting entrepreneurship skills to students, most educators will likely go the obvious route — how can we teach students to build successful businesses that will help them in their post-graduation careers. But there are also a host of skills that successful business leaders use every day that can help students no matter what path they choose.

“Most schools that are working with this topic are teaching students to conceptualize new ideas and build business plans around those ideas—or to actually go out and create a company,” said Cheryl Lemke, who is president of the Metiri Group, an education technology research firm. “We think that’s a great idea for a subset of kids, but you’re probably not going to reach every child by doing that.”

In her many years of studying 21st century skills, researcher Lemke has identified five key skills that are essential to becoming a successful entrepreneur. She describes these skills as tolerance of ambiguity, calculated risk-taking, persistence, evidence-based reasoning, and self-direction.…Read More

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