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Last month, I delivered a keynote on the future of education. It’s a vast topic, so I focused on four trends likely to impact our work as educators.
As school leaders prepare for the 2022-2023 school year, these four trends can help them identify district priorities and create a strategic plan for the year ahead.
The pandemic pushed teachers and learners online out of necessity. By fall 2020, 69% of districts offered a virtual school option, up from 27% before COVID, and 30% of district leaders, administrators, and teachers expect to see significant growth in blended learning (Arnett, 2021).
Some of the factors contributing to this growth include:
A challenge associated with the increasing growth in blended and online learning is that survey data indicates, “Many current approaches to remote and hybrid instruction aim to replicate the conventional classroom experience online” (Arnett, 2021). However, traditional approaches to instruction fail to maximize the benefits and affordances of the online learning environment. Designing learning experiences for blended or online learning environments demands a high degree of intentionality about what students do synchronously versus asynchronously. To optimize blended learning and online learning, educators need professional development focused on designing student-centered learning experiences that blend active, engaged learning online with active, engaged learning offline.
Teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers due, in part, to the strain of the last three years. When surveyed, 77% of teachers report feeling somewhat or extremely exhausted. 33% of teachers say they are very likely to leave the profession in the next two years, up from 13% before the pandemic (Hanover Research, 2022). Hiring and retaining high-quality teachers will be a challenge for school districts in the upcoming year.
As districts grapple with high levels of teacher turnover, it is essential to understand the connection between work engagement, job satisfaction, and teacher self-efficacy (Granziera & Perera, 2019). Teachers have faced shifting teaching and learning landscapes in the last three years. They transitioned online with little warning and, in many cases, no training to prepare them for teaching online. This negatively impacted their feelings of self-efficacy or their confidence in their ability to do this work well.
The rough transition online and the challenge of engaging students learning in home environments that may not have been conducive to online learning created myriad obstacles for teachers. Student engagement and teacher engagement are reciprocal, so it is not surprising that the lack of student engagement online had a devastating impact on teacher engagement (Roth, Assor, Kanat-Maymon & Kaplan, 2007; Tucker, 2020).
When teachers finally returned to classrooms, they faced new challenges, including concurrent teaching, hybrid schedules, students re-entering schools with trauma, substitute shortages, and fears about contracting COVID. All of this made an already challenging profession more exhausting and stressful.
Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers will require that school districts compensate teachers well for this demanding work. They also need to support teachers in their continued learning and growth with high-quality professional learning opportunities that help them develop high levels of self-efficacy.
As schools reopened, there was a focus on learning loss, and educators felt pressure to make up lost ground and get students “caught up.” Unfortunately, the pressure to address learning loss may have overshadowed the more significant issue of students returning with trauma after two years of social isolation. 49% of students reported feeling “depressed, stressed, or anxious to the point of interfering with their learning.” 71% of teachers said that student morale was lower than before the pandemic (Hanover Research, 2022).
After two years of remote learning, students needed to be reacclimated to an academic learning environment. They needed to feel connected to a supportive learning community where they felt welcomed and safe. Although social-emotional learning (SEL) has been a frequent talking point in education, it needs to be woven into the fabric of our students’ classes.
The CASEL Framework for SEL provides a concrete path for applying evidence-based SEL strategies to our students’ daily lives at school. Educators who focus on integrating SEL skills into their classes can help students manage their emotions, make responsible choices, consider the impact of their behavior on others, and develop healthy relationships. When students develop their SEL skills, they can also take a more active role in their learning, sharing the responsibility for learning with their teachers.
As we approach the 2022-2023 school year, teachers and students will benefit from a focus on SEL, not as an add-on but rather as a skill set integrated into every subject area, to create more robust learning communities and help students develop the skills necessary to thrive in schools and beyond.
Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education, said, “While COVID-19 has worsened many inequities in our schools and communities, we know that even before the pandemic, a high-quality education was out of reach for too many of our nation’s students and families.” The pandemic exacerbated existing inequities and has had a disproportionally negative impact on students from underserved communities, including communities of color, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities. Moving forward, Cardona emphasizes the need to “create more culturally and linguistically responsive and inclusive learning environments for all students.”
In the last two years, my focus has been on helping school districts and teachers leverage Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and blended learning to create more accessible, inclusive, and equitable learning experiences for all students.
UDL is a framework grounded in brain-based research and provides “concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities” (CAST, 2022).
While working with Dr. Katie Novak on our book UDL and Blended Learning, we focused on exploring the synergy between these two frameworks. We explore how blended learning models can make implementing UDL more manageable and sustainable.
Universally designed blended learning is grounded in four fundamental beliefs:
The two aspects of education that will not change in the future are 1) learner variability and 2) technology. Given these realities, schools must help teachers understand how to universally design blended learning to honor learner variability and maximize the impact of technology in classrooms.
The summer is a time to reflect, refocus, and prepare for a new year. After the challenges of the last school year, it is critical that school leaders focus on preparing teachers to begin the 2022-2023 school year with the skills they need to design and facilitate equitable learning experiences that integrate SEL and leverage technology to better meet the needs of all learners.
Arnett, T. (2021). Breaking the Mold: How a global pandemic unlocks innovation in K–12 instruction. The Christensen Institute. Retrieved from https://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BL-Survey-1.07.21.pdf.
CAST. (2022). About Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from https://www.cast.org/impact/universal-design-for-learning-udl
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). What Is the CASEL Framework? Retrieved from https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework
Granziera, H., & Perera, H. N. (2019). Relations among teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, engagement, and work satisfaction: A social cognitive view. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 58, 75–84.
Hanover Research. (2022). 2022 Trends in K-12 Education. Retrieved from www.hanoverresearch.com/reports-and-briefs/2022-trends-in-k-12-education
Roth, G., Assor, A., Kanat-Maymon, Y., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Autonomous motivation for teaching: How self-determined teaching may lead to self-determined learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(4), 761–774.
Tucker, C. (2020). Teacher engagement in full-release blended learning courses. [Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
U.S. Department of Education. (2021). Department of Education Announces Actions to Advance Equity in Education. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-announces-actions-advance-equity-education
A retrospective, or “look back,” is a strategy that can be used by school leaders, professional learning communities (PLCs), and teachers to engage a group in a structured reflection and brainstorming session. A retrospective can happen any time during the school year (e.g., end of a semester or unit) to encourage a reflective practice, gather feedback, and make adjustments to improve a group’s experience.
A retrospective strives to answer four questions:
The goal of a retrospective is to encourage a group or team to reflect on their work, so they can create an action plan to build on their successes and implement changes for improvement.
If you are a school leader guiding your staff through a retrospective, a coach facilitating a retrospective for a PLC, or an individual teacher using this strategy with your students, you may want to use a digital tool, like Jamboard or Padlet. A virtual platform makes it possible for participants to share their reflections in a digital space where they can see and interact with each other’s ideas. If you are using a Padlet Wall, like the one pictured below, select the column feature to organize responses under each of the four questions. Once participants post their ideas to the virtual wall, they can heart or comment on each other’s virtual post-its.
If you prefer Jamboard, I suggest creating a slide for each question to ensure the group’s responses to each question are organized and easy to navigate.
If you prefer to make this a more tactile experience, you can segment a whiteboard into four sections or post each of the four questions in each of the four corners of a room. Then participants can capture their reflections on actual post-it notes and add them to the board or wall.
Once you’ve decided on the strategy you will use to facilitate your retrospective, you will want to follow the steps below to maximize the effectiveness of this activity.
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Step 1 Reflect & Post |
Review the four questions with your group of teachers or students and give them time to reflect on the year and capture their thoughts on digital or physical post-it notes. Ask the members of your group to post their responses to each question. |
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Step 2 Silent Gallery Walk |
Once everyone has posted their thoughts, give the group time to do a silent gallery walk of the responses to see what other members of the group had to say in response to each question. |
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Step 3 Review & Cluster |
As the facilitator, you will want to identify ideas that were repeated by multiple people to identify trends in the responses and cluster similar responses together. |
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Step 4 Discuss & Brainstorm |
Once you have reviewed the responses with the group and clustered the similar responses, group participants into smaller groups of 3-5 individuals. That way, they can engage in conversation and begin to identify the most important items from the board to create an action plan for next year. Each group should collaborate to identify:3 things that are working well that the staff or class would like to see continue.3 things that are not working that need to be reimagined.3 struggles, questions, or wonderings they want to explore further. |
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Step 5 Create an Action Plan |
Ask each group to spend time discussing and brainstorming solutions they think can help the group reimagine the three things that are not working. Encourage each group to collaborate to come up with creative solutions! |
As groups discuss the aspects of their work or their experience that did not go well, encourage them to capture their ideas on an action plan document, like the one pictured below. Ask them to brainstorm ways they think this thing could be reimaged and challenge them to identify what would be needed to make those changes (e.g., resources, a shift in mindset) and how they would measure success as this change is implemented.
The beauty of this final step is that the school leader, coach, or teacher facilitating the retrospective can tap into the collective intelligence of the group to generate ideas for how to improve everyone’s experience moving forward. The ideas generated during the retrospective can be captured, saved, and then referenced at the end of summer as school leaders, coaches, and teachers prepare for a new school year!
Calling all coaches!
“This was an excellent learning experience for me. As a coach and as a PD leader, I took away many concrete examples that I can use with my staff.”
Who is this course for?
What can you expect from this course?
This school year has been intense! Teachers are eager to rest, recharge, and hit the reset button! Many teachers use the summer break to take stock of the year and reflect on what they want to do differently in the year ahead.
As teachers reflect on this challenging year, it’s important to remember why many of us entered this profession in the first place. We wanted to spark a life-long love of learning in our students. We imagined energetic classrooms full of curious students eager to learn. As I discovered early in my career, that reality is hard to manifest in a teacher-led classroom where students have little control over their experience. Students are more likely to be motivated to learn if they enjoy higher levels of autonomy and agency!
As teachers plan for the next school year, I’d love for them to add an instructional model to their teaching tool belts that allows them to:
That’s why I am excited to announce the release of my first mini-course focused on the station rotation model!
This mini-course has 11 video lessons complete with templates, resources, and “your turn” application activities to help participants put what they are learning into practice. The goal is for participants to leave the course with a high-quality station rotation lesson they can use immediately.
The course will also provide information on classroom management, grouping strategies, and tips for maximizing the success of the station rotation model. It will also address concerns about large class sizes and short class periods! Check out the curriculum below!
If you want to purchase this mini-course for multiple teachers on your campus to support self-paced online learning this summer, fill out this form for a group rate! You’ll be contacted directly to coordinate a bulk purchase of licenses.
Want to learn more about the station rotation model? Check out this blog.
After years of coaching and working with teachers, there are two things I consistently encounter that cause imbalance in the classroom and beyond.
#1 Teacher Talk is a Barrier to Connection
In previous posts, I’ve focused on this first point by encouraging teachers to use blended learning models and strategies to free themselves from the front of the room. When designing lessons where teachers want to transfer information via a mini-lesson or lecture, I encourage them to ask themselves, “Am I going to say the same thing to everyone?”
The goal is to shift the transfer of information online using video and other resources (e.g., podcasts, curated online resources) and free the teacher to spend more time facilitating learning. If teachers are not trapped at the front of the room during the lesson, there are myriad ways they can use that time.
#2 Traditional Grading Practices are Exhausting and Unsustainable
This brings me to the second thing I’ve learned as a coach. Too many teachers are grading everything. They worry that if they do not grade everything, students will not do the work. This approach to grading creates massive amounts of work for the teacher, who may have anywhere from 30-170 students.
I have shared the flowchart below before, but it is the strategy I used as a teacher and now use as a coach to rethink how teachers use their finite time and energy.
I want to focus on that last leg in the flowchart. Suppose the work is an assessment or finished product, like an essay, performance task, or project. In that case, the teachers should focus their energy on grading that finished piece with a standards-aligned rubric, but they should not spend hours writing comments, suggestions, and corrections on that finished piece. Teachers should give feedback when students are working on the assignment, not at the end of the process when they will not act on the feedback.
Some teachers balk at the suggestion of using a rubric and not writing comments because that isn’t how they’ve approached grading in the past. Even though most teachers dislike grading, many are hesitant to explore alternatives to their current approach. Despite the initial hesitation, the teachers I’ve coached quickly realize there is a more effective and sustainable way to grade: side-by-side assessments.
Side-by-side Assessments
I began using side-by-side assessments after reading a quote by Margaret Heritage, who said “the word ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin verb ‘assidere,’ meaning ‘to sit with.’ This word origin implies that in assessment the teacher sits with the learner, and assessment is something teachers do with and for students rather than to students.”
I remember having an “ah-ha” moment when I read this. It made absolute sense. Why was I grading at home in isolation? If the grades were worthy of going in the grade book, why wouldn’t I carve out time in class to facilitate side-by-side assessments so students could understand why they were getting the grades they were getting? I also saw an opportunity to use grading as a strategy to develop my relationships with students and to lighten my load.
Setting Up for Side-by-side Assessments
As with most things in education, preparation is key to implementing the side-by-side assessment strategy. You will feel more prepared if you move through the following steps:
Facilitating Side-by-side Assessments
When it comes time to facilitate the side-by-side assessments, I encourage you to do the following:
You may find students will ask for support or additional instruction. In that case, add their name and request to a list. These are assessment sessions, not instruction sessions. You won’t have time to provide personalized instruction given the limited time you will have with each student, but you can document those requests. Then, you can reference those notes to design follow-up lessons that aim to provide targeted instruction and support to close gaps or address student concerns.
As teachers prepare for the final weeks of the school year, this can be a powerful way to approach grading final projects and authentic assessments. Side-by-side assessments turn grading into an opportunity to connect with learners and create transparency around the grading process, which often feels opaque from a student’s perspective. It can also eliminate the need for teachers to spend the better part of the first week of summer break grading assessments and projects. And as everyone in education can agree, teachers need their break this year to rest, recharge, and push the reset button!
Read more about side-by-side assessments and other strategies designed to create more balance in your work!
Los estudios latinoamericanos sobre publicaciones en Ciencias Sociales no son abundantes; estas disciplinas merecen mayor atención en países de la región por parte de los sistemas científicos nacionales. Este estudio analiza la producción científica peruana y colombiana en Ciencias Sociales publicada en Web of Science (2011-2020) con el objetivo de determinar indicadores de colaboración y analizar redes de coautoría entre instituciones y países, además de identificar la estructura intelectual mediante cocitación y acoplamiento bibliográfico de autores. Se analizaron 2888 documentos para Perú y 12747 para Colombia, a partir de los cuales se identificó el patrón de colaboraciones en ambos países con tendencia a constituir mayor cantidad de vínculos internacionales que regionales. Pese a la amplia diferencia en el número de documentos, los indicadores de colaboración siguen dinámicas similares en ambos países; también es común el acoplamiento bibliográfico y la cocitación enfocados en autores clásicos de estas disciplinas y en autores institucionales.
El presente estudio tiene como finalidad examinar la presencia de la alfabetización en datos en los programas de formación de usuarios ofertados por las bibliotecas y/o centros de recursos para el aprendizaje y la investigación (CRAI), así como diseñar una propuesta formativa a este respecto. Para ello, se efectúa una investigación de tipo exploratorio, descriptivo y propositivo. La muestra la conforman los más de quinientos cincuenta cursos planteados por las bibliotecas-CRAI de las setenta y dos universidades españolas, en el curso académico 2020-2021. La técnica aplicada es el análisis de contenido de las páginas web institucionales de las bibliotecas académicas y, en concreto, de sus servicios de formación. Los resultados obtenidos ponen de manifiesto que la integración de la data literacy en los programas de alfabetización informacional propuestos por las unidades de información universitarias es todavía insuficiente, lo que justifica la necesidad de ofrecer una propuesta de formación en datos.
La preservación digital es una herramienta necesaria para lograr la conservación íntegra y perdurable de todo tipo de archivo documental, más indispensable aún en los archivos sonoros, documentos vulnerables a los cambios tecnológicos, que al ser grabados y procesados en soportes específicos, quedan rápidamente obsoletos. El objetivo de esta revisión sistematizada fue identificar las estrategias de preservación digital utilizadas en la preservación de archivos y recursos sonoros y sus aplicaciones según su formato. La búsqueda bibliográfica se efectuó en doce bases de datos multidisciplinarias, seleccionándose 16 artículos para la investigación, a partir de los cuales se identificaron once estrategias de preservación digital. Se pudo concluir que las estrategias más utilizadas son migración, metadatos de preservación, copias de seguridad y emulación. Por otra parte, no fue posible establecer un parámetro de aplicación de las estrategias de preservación digital según el tipo de formato de los archivos sonoros.
Este artículo tuvo como objetivo realizar un análisis bibliométrico en el periodo 2015 - 2019, de la producción científica en psicología colombiana indexada en Scopus. Los datos de los países latinoamericanos se recolectaron a través Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Las principales variables analizadas fueron el número total de documentos y de citaciones y el porcentaje de colaboración internacional; también se tuvo en cuenta los datos pertenecientes a las revistas colombianas en el área de psicología indexada en Scopus. Se encontró que Colombia presenta el mayor porcentaje de crecimiento en producción científica durante el periodo analizado, sin embargo, su contribución total de producción en la región es muy inferior a países como Brasil, México y Chile. Igualmente, se evidenció que Colombia es el segundo país latinoamericano que cuenta con mayor número de revistas de psicología en Scopus, diez (10), no obstante, se sitúa como el cuarto país en número de documentos.
Este artículo analiza la producción científica en Comunicación en revistas indexadas en Q1 y Q2 de la Web of Science, perteneciente a autores con afiliación a instituciones españolas. Los objetivos son: determinar la evolución de dicha producción, la afiliación institucional, las temáticas abordadas, el idioma de publicación y las redes internacionales de coautoría. Se han identificado las revistas de Comunicación en InCites (JCR) pertenecientes a los dos primeros cuartiles. Se ha procedido a la búsqueda por título de revista en WoS y se ha realizado un tratamiento de datos y normalización. Se observa que el incremento de artículos en Q1 y Q2 durante el período estudiado (2007-2017) coincide con cambios en los sistemas de evaluación de méritos de ANECA. A pesar de este aumento, la proyección internacional es escasa, siendo dos revistas españolas las de mayor concentración de autorías.
La alarmante propagación de la COVID-19 ha generado una producción científica sin precedentes en respuesta a la búsqueda de tratamientos y vacunas que ayuden a frenar la pandemia. Los medios de comunicación, las redes sociales y científicas se han convertido en un escenario primordial para la difusión de publicaciones académicas y, en consecuencia, en herramientas potenciales para evaluar el impacto social de la investigación sobre la COVID-19. El presente trabajo propone analizar el impacto y uso de las publicaciones en redes sociales y científicas mediante el empleo de indicadores altmétricos. Se emplean como herramientas las bases de datos Dimensions y Altmetric.com para el análisis de la producción científica y la atención en línea recibida. Los resultados evidencian un predominio de las menciones de Twitter, seguidos por las lecturas y citas en Mendeley y Dimensions. Los temas con mayor atención se relacionaron con tratamientos, vías de transmisión, síntomas, muertes y vacunas.
El objetivo de este artículo, basado en resultados del proyecto I+D+i “Mapas de la investigación en comunicación en las Universidades españolas de 2007 a 2018”, es ofrecer el estado actual de la presencia, acceso y liderazgo de las mujeres en la investigación académica en el campo de la comunicación. Los resultados muestran que la brecha de género subsiste en ciencias sociales y, en menor medida, en el campo de la comunicación. Las mujeres consuman en mayor proporción que los hombres su doctorado y aventajan a éstos en la autoría de contribuciones a congresos y presencia en la Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación como asociadas, sin que esto tenga un correlato en la progresión de su carrera académica respecto a ocupar posiciones de liderazgo en la dirección de proyectos de I+D+i, tesis doctorales, grupos de investigación, puestos de responsabilidad en la Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación o en la publicación de artículos en las revistas de mayor impacto de la especialidad.
Las editoriales, revistas, organismos públicos y privados, así como las instituciones académicas, han promovido en los últimos años la compartición de aquel material que forma parte del proceso de investigación, pero que por diversas razones no se ha podido incluir en la publicación final. No obstante, poco se sabe sobre cuánto de este material adicional efectivamente se comparte y cuáles son sus características. Por ello, el objetivo de este estudio es analizar en qué medida comparte material adicional en publicaciones científicas el personal docente e investigador (PDI) de la Universitat de València (UV). Para ello, se obtuvo una muestra representativa de los 5.679 artículos publicados por el PDI de la UV en el año 2018. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que solo una cuarta parte de los documentos tiene algún tipo de material adicional, con una baja frecuencia de archivos con material reutilizable y focalizados especialmente en áreas del conocimiento específicas. Sin embargo, de estos, una gran mayoría están en el primer cuartil de Journal Cititation Report o Scimago Journal Rank. Se sugiere la necesidad de establecer políticas en la Universitat de València que promuevan la formación sobre el depósito de material adicional y datos de investigación en los artículos de investigación.
Noticias em eLiteracias 