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.

Why design thinking is important in early childhood education

In early childhood education, most parents are aware of the importance of teaching key academic skills such as early literacy and mathematics skills. Recent research also suggests that problem-solving is an equally important skillset to teach young children. While the design thinking model is implemented in K-12 education, it is relatively new in early childhood education but highly effective.

What is design thinking? Design thinking is an iterative process used to solve real-world problems. At its core, design thinking has several steps: Identify a problem, design potential solutions, test the solutions, redesign as needed and share the solutions with a wider audience. Design thinking is used regularly in many fields (engineering, business, IT, health care, etc.) and has recently gained wide popularity due to the effectiveness of this problem-solving approach.

Why is design thinking important? As pediatrician Laura Jana notes in her book, The Toddler Brain, 65 percent of today’s children will face unknown careers and problems when they are adults. Children will always need to solve problems throughout their lives and the difficulties they face will grow in complexity as they mature. Design thinking is a lifelong skill that children may use to tackle complex problems throughout their lives, so it is a valuable skill to learn early in life, particularly within the first five years. According to Dr. Jana, there is a direct connection between early skills and workforce development. The 21st century competencies valued by today’s business world are one and the same with the core social, emotional, language and executive function skills that can be fostered in early childhood. Forbes explains that design thinking is a way for businesses to increase productivity, foster innovation and eliminate wasted time and money on guesswork-based development by empowering front-line workers to collaborate on diverse teams and explore new ideas. Design thinking helps children build a resilience-focused mindset and teaches many of the 21st century skills, such as the four C’s: creativity, collaboration, compassion and confidence. These are skills children can use to address increasingly complex problems throughout their lives.…Read More

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7 Mindsets Announces Key Additions to Executive Leadership Team Amidst Growth

ROSWELL, Ga. — 7 Mindsets, the leader in Pre-K-12 mindsets-based learning and well-being solutions, today announced the extension of its executive leadership team with the appointments of Robin Glenn as chief strategy and business development officer and Clark McKown, Ph.D., as chief science officer.

Glenn, founder of BASE Education, a student mental health solution acquired by 7 Mindsets in January 2023, will oversee curriculum development and strategic initiatives for 7 Mindsets. Since 2013, Glenn has been dedicated to the development and growth of BASE Education, utilizing her 25 years of experience working with at-risk teens to build the company’s online mental health curriculum. Her professional work has included roles as a school-based therapy specialist, parent, educator, and law enforcement trainer, private practice therapist for adolescents and their families, treatment coordinator for intensive in/outpatient teen programs, and research specialist in clinical trials for adolescents with addictions.

McKown is the founder of xSEL Labs, a creator of scalable systems to assess and address the social and emotional needs of children, which was also acquired by 7 Mindsets last month. As chief science officer, he will lead 7 Mindsets’ work to provide meaningful and actionable assessments alongside its program offerings. McKown, a nationally recognized leader, researcher, and author in the field of SEL assessment, has served as a principal investigator on several federal and foundation grants whose purpose was to design, develop, validate, and scale social and emotional assessment systems.…Read More

Simplified K-12 cybersecurity streamlines student data access

Remember when moving from one end of a state to another often meant changing phone numbers because the new residence would be in a different area code? And, after cell phones were born, remember when relocating across the country meant ditching a cell phone company, along with the number, because the new area of the country didn’t include the same coverage?

Chances are, if you are as old as I am, these scenarios do sound familiar. For most cell phone users, however, changing cell numbers just because you relocate is a foreign concept. A cell phone number becomes part of who we are, part of our contact identity, and, if we don’t want to, we never have to change cell numbers again. 

Now, let’s apply this scenario to today’s school environment and student data. Huh? I know you’re thinking this analogy might be a stretch, but stay with me, and I promise this will all make sense.…Read More

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IGNITE! Reading Announces $10m Series A Financing To Meet Accelerating School Demand For Its Virtual 1:1 Literacy Tutoring Program

SAN FRANCISCO – Ignite! Reading, a rapidly growing provider of virtual tutoring services that enable K-12 schools to dramatically accelerate student reading progress, closed a $10 Million Series A round of financing, led by Rethink Education. Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin and founding or current partners from Comcast Ventures, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Hellman & Friedman and Wing Venture Capital also participated in the financing as individual investors. The funding will be used to add more world-class professionals to Ignite’s leadership team, invest in its technology platform, and enable the company to scale its program to meet accelerating demand from schools and districts nationwide. 

Ignite is helping K-12 schools reverse pandemic-related learning losses by providing struggling readers with 15 minutes a day of one-on-one virtual instruction by tutors trained in the Science of Reading. Ignite’s easy-to-implement program teaches foundational reading skills, and students recorded an average of 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week in the program during the 2021-2022 school year. The company is now teaching students to read in over 35 schools across seven states with no achievement gap for students of color, students with IEPs, multilingual learners or students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

“With students learning to read at twice the rate that would be expected in a traditional classroom setting, Ignite! Reading’s one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring model is not just transforming how kids are taught to read, but how literacy instruction is being operationalized in schools. Teachers love the academic results Ignite is delivering and are equally excited by the significant positive impact on students’ social emotional learning,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Co-Founder and CEO of Ignite! Reading.…Read More

5 education innovation trends worth watching in 2023

2022 marked a confusing year in the world of education innovation. As a friend and school leader said to me a few months ago, “Innovation is dead, right?” 

She was half joking while perfectly summing up something in the air last year in schools: a pandemic hangover mixed with ongoing, day-to-day challenges of running complex systems. Together, these made many “new” approaches to education feel too overwhelming to even entertain. 

Lurking behind that, a surreal dynamic was unfolding across both K-12 and higher education: as emergency closures subsided, schools quickly regressed to their pre-pandemic approaches, despite new or worsening challenges at their doorstep. That re-entrenchment makes good sense given the resilience of traditional business models. Yet, it doesn’t match up with new realities like stark learning gaps, worsening mental health crises, significant enrollment declines, and a cooling job market. Business as usual is a rational response for a taxed and weary education system, but it’s also risky in light of all the ways the world has changed.…Read More

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PowerSchool Launches New Tools and Resources to Help Educators Personalize Learning, Support Student Needs, and Increase Operational Excellence

FOLSOM, Calif. — PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC), the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, today announced updates to its  PowerSchool Unified Classroom® and  PowerSchool Unified Insights™ solutions. These updates include new data-driven personalized learning products, LearningNav and ContentNav, and a new resource library within  Unified Insights MTSS, which will provide educators with vetted, research-backed strategies and tools. PowerSchool also announced time-saving software Clouds built to provide educators with a more connected approach to planning, engaging, and monitoring students’ unique needs. 

As we emerge from the past two and half years, the impact of the dramatic learning disruptions experienced by students nationwide is evident. In fact, the results from the latest “National Report Card,” distributed by the  National Assessment of Educational Progress, shows declines in math and reading scores for the U.S.’ fourth and eighth graders with math scores having the largest declines since NAEP testing began in 1990. Each student is at a different place in their learning journey, making it clear that educators need tools and resources that will help personalize learning, address individual student needs, and streamline their operations. 

LearningNav: Building Personalized Pathways …Read More

Transeo Names EdTech Industry Leader Cecilia Retelle Zywicki as CEO

DENVER (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Transeo, the leading platform for connecting work-based learning opportunities to K-12 schools, named  Cecilia Retelle Zywicki as CEO. Zywicki was most recently COO of PresenceLearning and SRC, respectively. Prior to that, she co-founded and was the COO at Ranku. Both PresenceLearning and Ranku were acquired for undisclosed amounts. 

Zywicki has more than a decade of experience leading, scaling, and building education companies. As COO of PresenceLearning, she built a scaled organization that leveraged technology to deliver high-quality online therapy solutions for children with diverse needs. Before that, Zywicki co-founded the software company Ranku in 2013, which built two-sided marketplaces for state systems to increase student enrollment. It also included recruitment and predictive analytics software before being acquired by John Wiley & Sons in 2016.

Zywicki has spent her career focused on upskilling the workforce after starting at the Chamber of Commerce and receiving her Juris Doctor from the University of Denver and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Education from the University of Minnesota – where she played ice hockey, twice appearing in the Frozen Four. …Read More

Savvas Learning Company Introduces the Newly Updated enVision Mathematics 2024

PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY — Savvas Learning Company, a K-12 next-generation learning solutions leader, introduced its newly updated enVision Mathematics series with many exciting enhancements inspired by feedback from math teachers, including brand-new family engagement resources to support student learning at home.

enVision © 2024, the newest edition of Savvas Learning Company’s highly-effective and best-selling math series for grades K-12, is now packed with even more student-centered activities that engage learners in real-world, meaningful math, along with a variety of new instructional support tools to save teachers time while offering them flexibility for lesson planning.

“Savvas has always been focused on providing educators the highest-quality math curriculum combined with the most flexible resources to make teaching easier, a commitment that has made enVision the nation’s most popular math program used in thousands of classrooms everywhere,” said Bethlam Forsa, CEO of Savvas Learning Company. “With new features centered around students and more supportive resources for both home and classroom, enVision offers an innovative curriculum that helps educators teach with confidence and engages students with hands-on, problem-based learning.”…Read More