Harsh and racially disparate discipline practices are widespread in America’s schools.
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Millions of college students volunteer at soup kitchens, animal shelters and other nonprofits near where they go to school. The arrangement gives these young adults valuable experience that can help them launch their careers while giving charities a hand.
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To teach writing is inextricable from teaching thinking. Simultaneously, those of us teaching writing can distinguish between something like good writing that can sit next to poor thinking, and flawed writing that includes important aspects of complex thinking.
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Fifteen kids from a dozen countries, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, recently brought a formal complaint to the United Nations. They’re arguing that climate change violates children’s rights as guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global agreement.
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All of the 2019 Nobel Prizes in science were awarded to men. That’s a return to business as usual, after biochemical engineer Frances Arnold won in 2018, for chemistry, and Donna Strickland received the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics.
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I believe that one of my most important tasks as a teacher is to stimulate intellectual curiosity. Of course, to do so, I must first experience intellectual curiosity myself. Secondly (and as a logical consequence of first experiencing intellectual curiosity), I must reveal my curious intellect to my students.
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In a major AI experiment, China has elementary school students “begin their lessons not by opening textbooks, but by putting on headbands” so their brain waves and “focus” can be monitored by computers. Students are then encouraged to compete with each other to be the most focused.
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We’ve become so obsessed with these scores – a set of discrete numbers – that we’ve lost sight of what they always were supposed to be about in the first place – learning.
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Classes in Chicago’s public schools were canceled starting Oct. 17 as more than 25,000 teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district went on strike in what they’re calling a fight for “justice and equity” for their students.
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Our decreasing social distance to other people in the world may also facilitate the spread of misinformation and fake news, especially when it captures our emotions or imaginations. But, it also rewards us with serendipitous discoveries of connectedness.
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It’s common knowledge that liberals and conservatives live in different places. After all, the idea of “red states” and “blue states” is based in reality. But preferences are much more local than that.
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If we want kids to have the best chance possible to adapt to a constantly changing environment then we must nurture their creativity. Merging the arts with social emotional learning and academic learning helps create students who care about the world in which they live.
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This is a first-person essay in response to recent PublicSource stories on the racial achievement gap in Allegheny County school districts.
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Diane Ravitch provides remarkable insights into her seminal thinking on public education, and on the dangers to democracy of treating parents as consumers, students as products, and teachers as compliant followers of commercial scripts.
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Historically and currently, public education—as well as charter schools and private schools—serve well the students with the most race, class, and gender privileges and mis-serve inexcusably the most vulnerable students. Accountability does not and cannot address that gap.
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Try not to get distracted. You may well not end up exactly where you envisioned at the start, but with luck and skill and effort and good partners and carefully applied expertise, you can end up someplace great and wonderful and rewarding.
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Active learning is not a specifically defined teaching technique. Rather, it’s a spectrum of instructional approaches, all of which involve students actively participating in lessons.
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Betsy DeVos rarely makes a statement without referring to her idea of Education Freedom. She is, of course, referring to school vouchers. But as education secretary she has been more about denying students true education freedom. DeVos stands for the opposite of educational freedom.
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Scholars in the humanities interpret human history, literature and imagery to figure out how people make sense of their world. Humanists challenge others to consider what makes a good life, and pose uncomfortable questions – for example, “Good for whom?” and “At whose expense?”
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Climate activists walked out of classrooms and workplaces in more than 150 countries on Friday, Sept. 20 to demand stronger action on climate change. Mass mobilizations like this have become increasingly common in recent years.
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