Education Elements

APRIL 25, 2023

I’ve gotten into strength training recently. I never thought this would be the path for me, a cardio lover, but after a recent foot injury, I needed to step away from running and try something new. I explored apps and training plans, trying to find the right fit for my schedule and preferences. As a consultant who has helped dozens of districts design and implement strategic plans, I also knew I could apply some of the principles we use when supporting districts to my weightlifting journey.

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Education Elements

JANUARY 24, 2023

Raise your hand if you are still trying to fill teacher vacancies, even though it’s the end of the first semester. How about if you’ve had teachers start the year, but they’ve since exited? Maybe you’ve heard this: “I’m considering not staying another year because even though I love my students, I no longer feel connected to the work.” These experiences represent an aspect of our current educational landscape.

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Education Elements

JANUARY 9, 2023

Recently I attended an event called, “Synergy in the Sciences to Support Literacy Instruction” hosted by Lexia Learning. It was a small round table discussion, including higher education leaders, researchers, politicians, policymakers, and district administrators. As the Chief Learning Officer of Scholarus Learning , I was there to provide inputs on how change might be implemented since Scholarus works with thousands of schools providing consulting, surveys, and custom curricula.

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Education Elements

DECEMBER 20, 2022

“I want to be in the room where it happens.”. There are so many powerful scenes in the award-winning musical, Hamilton. The moment Aaron Burr laments being left out of the decision-making process is not only a turning point in the story but a great depiction of how many feel when it comes to the all-important “rooms” where decisions that affect their lives are made.

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Education Elements

DECEMBER 13, 2022

More than ever, teachers need connections and opportunities to talk about student learning, celebrate progress and discuss overcoming challenges. The welcome and standard structure of PLCs in schools is an obvious route for these professional conversations. It is easy for meetings to be eaten up with personal stories, professional questions, and school concerns.

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Meeting Learning 212

Education Elements

NOVEMBER 21, 2022

The stories, run in newspapers across the country each week, paint a desperate picture: a Pre-K teacher in Texas juggling two classrooms alone; classes across the country led by a recurring series of long-term substitutes with no formal training ; a school district in Pennsylvania forced to shorten school days due to lack of staff; districts in North Carolina reporting hundreds of vacant teaching positions even as the school year begins.

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Education Elements

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

The creation of a shared instructional vision brings many benefits to a school or district. An instructional vision can provide a shared understanding of what instructional excellence looks, feels, and sounds like. It aligns classroom practices to a clear set of principles and expectations. It can also bring instructional unity to any district plagued with uncertainty about instructional practices.

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Education Elements

OCTOBER 25, 2022

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Education Elements

OCTOBER 19, 2022

Gaps. Learning loss. Interventions. All of those words represent important topics that existed pre-pandemic yet were magnified when students returned to in-person instruction. But in true educator fashion, resilience prevailed. Many districts and campuses found innovative ways to meet students where they were. We saw organizations revisiting their missions and visions to determine if what students now needed matched their organization’s statements.

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Education Elements

OCTOBER 11, 2022

The teacher attrition crisis in US education has been in the headlines a lot in recent months. Many districts and schools started the 22-23 school year woefully understaffed, leading districts to implement drastic stop gap measures just to open their doors. Some districts opened this fall with armies of substitute teachers, shortened school days, and were forced to implement confusing and sub-optimal alternative schedules.

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Education 250

Education Elements

AUGUST 22, 2022

Teacher turnover is an issue that has impacted school districts all across the country. Teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers while not enough are entering it. Therefore school districts are scrambling to fill vacancies with qualified educators. Teacher retention is a complicated issue. It is a challenge that has many facets, none of which seem to have simple solutions.

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Education 293

Education Elements

AUGUST 1, 2022

You have just spent months engaging your community, identifying your priorities and getting your wording just right. It feels like you are inches from the finish line as you think about rolling out your final plan to the community. This is certainly a huge feat and worth a celebration but you are not quite done yet!

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Education Elements

JULY 26, 2022

During the next few weeks, districts and schools will begin the process of welcoming and onboarding their new teachers for the 22-23 school year. When done effectively, new teacher onboarding can allow new staff to gain clarity on their specific roles and feel welcomed into their school community.

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Education Elements

JULY 18, 2022

March 2nd is a day that will never be forgotten in Putnam County, TN. Our small community woke up to the sirens of an EF4 tornado that rocked our community and two weeks later our school system closed when the COVID pandemic hit home all across the state of Tennessee.

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System 250

Education Elements

JULY 3, 2022

Addressing the staffing shortage in public schools may seem like running a marathon barefoot, uphill, and in the sweltering sun. When faced with an ever-expanding school and district improvement checklist, it’s human nature to pick the seemingly more manageable task first. Why not run the morning mile on the padded track instead of the impossible race?

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Education Elements

JULY 2, 2022

To meet the needs of an ever-changing tomorrow , school districts must continue to grow and evolve. At its most desired state, a classroom is a laboratory of innovation and its teacher, a "mad" scientist - working everyday to make connections between students and the content. Unfortunately, the chaotic uncertainty of the last two years have left educators fighting to survive, leaving little time for experimentation.

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Education Elements

JUNE 21, 2022

If you lead a district, school, or department, or if you are a teacher yourself, then you may have seen that civil discourse that relies on evidence is increasingly under attack. We might experience this, at times locally in our Board meetings, and nationally in the broader conversation.

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Education Elements

JUNE 6, 2022

When teachers don’t have access to strong materials, they search for them often online, leading to inconsistent quality and weak alignment to the standards. In fact, some have found that teachers spend 7-12 hours per week searching for and creating instructional resources.

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Education Elements

MAY 16, 2022

"Feedback is a gift." Most of us have heard this common phrase as educators, coaches, and professionals. But if feedback is a gift, why does receiving it sometimes trigger uneasiness, anxiety, and stress?

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Education 207

Education Elements

MAY 9, 2022

We all know that teachers should feel appreciated every day. As a former high school science teacher, I was filled up by the positive notes from students, small gifts, and verbal affirmations received during teacher appreciation week. Recognition is an important way for teachers to feel appreciated; we believe that in our four essential elements of teacher belonging ( Agency, Development, Equity, and Wellness ), appreciation is relevant to all categories, especially Development and Wellness.

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Education Elements

MAY 2, 2022

In our work with districts across the country, we frequently hear questions about instructional materials–from how to select high quality programs that match their needs, to building processes that are inclusive of key stakeholders, to developing sustainable processes for regularly reviewing and refining curriculum, just to name a few. Oftentimes, we see teams wanting to jump directly into reviewing materials or selecting a new program.

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Education Elements

APRIL 25, 2022

Next week is Teacher Appreciation Week. Although we at Education Elements believe that teachers should be celebrated on any day that ends in a “y”, we also are excited to join in the Nationwide celebrations next week. As a former teacher, a little “thank you” went a long way, a gifted morning coffee fueled me to empower my students through testing season, and a card highlighting my impact reminded me of my “why.”.

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Education Elements Education 260

Education Elements

APRIL 14, 2022

“ When you drive up to John F Kennedy High School in Cleveland, OH, you are immediately taken by the sheer scale of the building. Set against a backdrop of single-family historic homes, JFK is an imposing and beautiful modern structure. The vision of the school was simple: to combine the staff from 3 previous high schools, including the “old” JFK, to create the New JFK.

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Education Elements

APRIL 11, 2022

This school year, Portland Public Schools (PPS) launched a multi-year strategic plan for educational equity, inclusion, and excellence with the core belief that the student experience needs to be reimagined. PPS’ district-wide focus spotlighted the middle school experience, where data revealed – regardless of metric – that students are not being adequately prepared for high school and beyond.

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Education Elements

APRIL 4, 2022

I can’t remember how many times I have been asked “Am I doing it right?” I’ve heard this question so many times in my support of over 150 schools as they implement personalized learning that I no longer count. Teachers and leaders want to know, am I “doing” personalized learning right.

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Education Elements

MARCH 28, 2022

Every teacher has a purpose. Every teacher has a reason that they entered the classroom. For some, that purpose originated when they were a student in school. For others, it was an unbridled passion for their content area. Each teacher’s own “why” is what makes them unique and valuable members of their school. However when adversity strikes, purpose is often the first thing that a teacher puts down.

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Classroom 147

Education Elements

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

In late May of 2020, as our country battled the coronavirus, the murder of George Floyd sent shockwaves through many communities, across the United States. In fact, his murder galvanized millions of Americans to examine structural and institutional inequities particularly for Black Americans, but also across race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status – a renewed focus not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

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Survey 201

Education Elements

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

These past three years have been very difficult for students, teachers, and school leaders. It seems that as life is getting “back to normal” there is something that comes in and disrupts the progress being made. What this time has shown us, though, is that this is the perfect opportunity to start fresh.

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FEBRUARY 14, 2022

A recent Forbes article said, “If the big challenge of 2021 was to get children back into the classroom, the challenge for 2022 is to keep teachers there.” With statistics showing a 66% rise in school-based departures and schools across the country scrambling to fill teacher and substitute shortages each week — all while working to bounce back from the pandemic — the need to support our teaching staff has never been greater.

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Classroom 261

Education Elements

FEBRUARY 8, 2022

This upcoming Sunday, many Americans will extend the yearly tradition of watching the last two NFL teams compete for the coveted Vince Lombardi Trophy. As a loyal Philadelphia Eagles fan myself, I am not too interested in the game this year, since it features the LA Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. What I am excited about most is the halftime show - this year featuring Dr.

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Education Elements

JANUARY 24, 2022

School district leaders face the enormous challenge of understanding and responding to how professional learning has been impacted by the global pandemic. This at a time when professional learning is so critical for educators who are navigating uncertainties around in-person consistency, increasing responsibilities, and shifting instructional modalities.

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Education Elements

JANUARY 17, 2022

When I was a teacher in Washington, D.C. I taught a class on local history. Students got to learn about places they had visited and people they had heard about. I’ve never taught a class where students were more deeply engaged in the actual content of the class.

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Education Elements

JANUARY 11, 2022

This past December, I found myself at home watching Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve on ABC. Across the variety of hosts, musical performances, and crowd interviews - one theme emerged through the night: everyone is hoping that 2022 will be better than 2021. 2021 will no doubt be remembered as a challenging year, not uniquely, but especially in the field of education.

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Education Elements

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

To see students and community members in action - that is the stuff we, as educators, dream about. Most recently in a suburban school district outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. My teammates, Megan Campion and Briana Cash , and I got to host community gatherings over the course of two-days with two in-person and two virtual sessions. These experiences confirmed the belief that districts should bring groups of people together to discuss and define the next strategic plan whether it’s a combination of v

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Education Elements

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

To many in the gardening and plant world, bonsais are among the most impressive trees. Bonsai is seen as a blend of gardening and art – a way to create living sculptures. A gardener might spend decades pruning the tree, little by little, year over year, so that it grows to the gardener’s exact vision. For instance, a Coast Redwood tree that, in the wild might grow to 100’-200’, may only grow to 1’ under the curated, decades-long care of the gardener.

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Personalized Learning Learning 209

Education Elements

OCTOBER 4, 2021

Strategic planning is the process of setting short and long-term goals, deciding on actions to achieve those goals and assembling the teams and resources needed to take those actions. Districts of all sizes benefit from developing a long range plan that formalizes the district’s mission, vision, values, goals, and objectives, while engaging the community, with the ultimate goal of both improving operational efficiency and providing an exceptional educational experience for all stakeholders.

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Education Elements

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

In our earlier versions of our Core Four of Personalized Learning, targeted instruction was primarily a teacher action separated from another Core Four element, data driven decision making. We recognize that this limited the potential impact that targeted instruction could have to personalize learning for students. As an exclusively teacher action, it missed the opportunity to empower students to advocate for themselves.

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