About Teaching

At this point in the school year, you've lost hours of precious sleep just staring at the ceiling, your morning coffee just doesn’t taste the same, and your 2 p.m. coffee doesn’t either. You’re left wondering: How can I possibly prepare my students for the new STAAR® redesign?

You don’t have to search for long to find educators talking about ChatGPT these days, and the conversation is all over the place. Of course, it’s understandable why everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, with its tremendous potential for both academic advancement and misuse. After all, education has never faced a challenge like this. Right?

We’re only just beginning to comprehend the implications and lessons of the pandemic’s impact on education--among them, the advantages and limits of remote education. For all its challenges, however, the quick shift to a remote--and thus more independent--learning model came with a pedagogical silver lining. After all, educators have long advocated for and pursued initiatives that emphasize the importance of cultivating greater student autonomy in the learning process. Of the many lessons to be taken from the pandemic, the move to remote learning has a lot to teach us about how to better cultivate more independent learners.

There are methods and strategies that enable and promote greater student agency in learning. But student agency is not reducible to “methods.” The unspoken assumption behind the latter tendency situates students as objects of a teacher’s instructional practice, not active subjects/agents capable of determining their own learning paths–a position that runs contrary to the whole point of student agency itself.

We’re only just beginning to comprehend the implications and lessons of the pandemic’s impact on education--among them, the advantages and limits of remote education. For all its challenges, however, the quick shift to a remote--and thus more independent--learning model came with a pedagogical silver lining. After all, educators have long advocated for and pursued initiatives that emphasize the importance of cultivating greater student autonomy in the learning process. Of the many lessons to be taken from the pandemic, the move to remote learning has a lot to teach us about how to better cultivate more independent learners.

So what is MTSS? In education MTSS stands for “Multi-tiered Systems of Support.” Pretty self-explanatory, right? I mean, right away we know the acronym indicates that there’s, well, a lot of systems, and they’re all organized in tiers, and it’s all about providing support. MTSS: It should stand for “Man,That’s So Simple!” One of the things I loved most about my 10+ years as a teacher was all the wonderful acronyms we got to learn. It felt like there was a new one every month. It was… wonderful. 

As it's becoming more clear that the non-academic elements of students’ lives impact their ability to perform academically, educators are feeling increased pressure and desire to take action in the classroom. Why does social emotional learning matter for schools and districts? Studies show that 75% of mental health support comes in a school setting. The question for educators becomes, where to start.

Particularly on high-stakes tests like the ACT, SAT, and AP exams, there’s nothing more frustrating than talking yourself out of an answer, only to find out later that your first instinct was actually correct. 

Of course, that’s not to say students should “trust their gut” for the entire process—if they’ve never heard of the quadratic formula, they’re not going to be able to just guess how to solve equations requiring that knowledge. Beyond that though, students should familiarize themselves with the actual types of questions and answer choices they’ll see on the test, whether that’s through in-class skill drills or at-home practice tests. 

So your students are in the right mindset, they’ve made studying more fun, and they understand what’s happening in their bodies when they’re dealing with test anxiety. 

Now, what do they actually do when test anxiety hits them in the middle of the exam? Well, they have some options, so introduce your students to all of the methods we’ll discuss in this blog post to be sure they have every tool they need to stop test anxiety in its tracks. 

Part IV in our series on "Emotional Test Prep"

Studies from the APA show a progressive rise in teen stress over at least the past decade—and high-stakes testing has no doubt played a part. In her book Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation, Vicki Abeles describes today’s youth as “the most tested generation in history” (110).

As we mentioned in our intro post a few weeks ago, the main culprit behind test anxiety is the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is produced in the adrenal glands, just above your kidneys, but let’s back up even further in this process. What triggers cortisol to be released in the first place? 

It all starts with the amygdalae, a pair of small regions in the brain that are part of the limbic system.

Educators know that learning fundamentally depends on failing. More specifically, learning depends on the ability to fail and learn from the experience, what psychologists call a “growth mindset”: The belief that we can improve over time, despite setbacks and failures, through effort and perseverance. 

The emotional skills required for success on tests—particularly high-pressure, high-stakes tests like the ACT and SAT—play a critical role in student performance. 

SEL (social-emotional learning) has found itself in the hotbed of an extremely emotional and political spotlight. What started as an innocent concept revolving around understanding and learning about non-academic elements of a student’s life, has quickly been associated or disassociated with theories, concepts, and practices outside of its scope. 

Students spend a mere fraction of their lives within the schools they attend, and success both in and out of school is dependent on multiple factors. Although quality education, which includes social emotional learning or SEL, is an important component in developmental success, it can’t replace benefits children can receive outside of school from certain familial, socioeconomic and social advantages. 

The skills that social and emotional learning addresses are those that would otherwise be developed through experience and support outside of the school: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

Moving from Reductive Labels to Dynamic Learning Ecosystems in Education

A challenge with a question or some difficulty in a class quickly turns into a sweeping self-generalization, a fixed label about one’s innate aptitude and ability, even their character. Terms like “lazy” and “slacker” come to mind. As a result, a simple question in a class suddenly becomes the terrain for a student’s overall sense of themselves as a person.

The question we need to be asking is if the intent of Social Emotional Wellness tools is improving student outcomes? Or is it to create analytics sets about them?

We've got the 411. One thing you knew you could expect is that we'd have an article reminding you about what you would not expect. 1. You'll get the first-day jitters. Teachers can teach for years and still be plagued by those little butterflies. Which means what? It's normal. Even if you don't expect it to be on year two or year 20. You have a new group of kids and even if your job is to teach them, you're still going to care about what they think, at least on some level. After all, if your kids don't like you, you can have some serious problems. Or maybe it won't even be your fault, but you'll get an army of brats. Or maybe it's totally irrational, but you just feel jittery for the heck of it.