Teaching Today

What is the best way to teach children to read? This question has plagued teachers, administrators, and literacy specialists for decades in the K-12 space. This question is often a highly controversial one, as literacy issues can become caught up in politics — both within the field of education and depending which expert or company or program one is aligned with.

This week, we're talking to Dr. Cristina Compton, a former elementary school educator and the Director of Program Development at the Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), and Kelsey Hammond, a former middle school English Language Arts’ educator and professional development coach, about the science of reading.

As teachers juggling many expectations, we may struggle to know whether our students are understanding what they are reading — unlike writing, reading comprehension is an entirely internal process. We may also struggle to keep up with the research surrounding best practices for improving our students’ reading comprehension.

In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Judy Willis, author of Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. Blending her experience as a board-certified practicing neurologist and a classroom teacher, Dr. Willis applies neuroscience research to successful teaching strategies, helping teachers bridge theory and practice.

Because the classroom space encompasses so many routines and expectations, it can be daunting to begin conversations around implementing and sustaining positive change.

Making a change — whether it's required or voluntary — can be difficult for both teachers and students. We can often become creatures of habit, comfortable with the status quo, even when we're aware that our habits could be improved.

Today, we are talking to Jen David-Lang from The Main Idea about the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear, which examines tiny changes we can make to remarkably improve our habits and routines in the classroom and beyond.

Designing projects for an individual class can be a daunting experience, but what about for a whole district, and in the wake of the pandemic?

At the height of exhaustion, many school and leaders within the Scarsdale Public Schools district were looking for ways to reignite a passion for learning in students and teachers. But how could teachers collaborate across disciplines, across grade levels, and across schools to develop curriculum that re-engaged their students?

Three school and district leaders from Scarsdale join us in this episode to examine their project-based learning district initiative — SPARK — and its impact on students and their larger community.

Writing projects can feel like a distraction, unless we look at the ways in which projects increase learning for students, and the ways in which we can integrate them into our calendars without losing teaching time for skills or content that we need to cover.

This week, we're joined by participants from all levels of our signature writing projects — Meg Davis, one of our K-12 coaches; Vicky Beswick, an NYC DOE teacher; and Juan Filan & Deylin Pena-Rodriguez — two 9th grade students who established their voices as student authors throughout the writing process.

Connecting real-world scenarios to classroom content creates wonderful learning opportunities for students — but it also requires that teachers make many decisions about how to organize, sequence, and assess their instruction.

Dr. Adele Bruni Ashley and Dr. Cristina Compton — both of whom lead CPET's project-based learning initiatives — talk with us this week about what sets project-based learning apart from traditional assessments, and how to build relevant instruction for students.

How can you locate effective teaching tools without spending hours combing through the internet? With website after website of education resources, it can be hard to tell which have been vetted and will be most useful for your practice.

This week, we're chatting with two members of our coaching team — Dr. Cristina Compton and Lauren Midgette — about the resources they're currently using, and how they navigate the world of online teaching tools without becoming overwhelmed.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

Making the Case for Project-Based Learning

(https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/making-the-case-for-project-based-learning)

The Believing Game: Fostering Empathy in the Classroom

(https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/the-believing-game-fostering-empathy-in-the-classroom)

Engagement is Everything: Three Pillars of Student Engagement

(https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/engagement-is-everything-three-pillars-of-student-engagement)

What Makes a Rigorous Question?

(https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/what-makes-a-rigorous-question)

Coaching for equity is personal, and more complex than simply providing new information about a teaching strategy or protocol. At CPET, we ground this important work in four entry points that allow for educators to create a cultural shift within a community toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Dr. Sherrish Holloman joins us this week to discuss the focus and potential challenges of each entry point, approaches to culturally relevant professional learning, and the recommendations that emerge as we coach toward change.

Given its complexity, conversations about grading for equity often dwell in highly theoretical spaces. Although these spaces can be conducive to nuanced discussion surrounding equity, they can also become distanced from practices used in real classrooms.

To achieve more equitable grading practices, theory and practice must come together — how can we implement culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy in our schools and with our students?

We’re talking with Michael Fram — Principal of New York City’s Repertory High School — about how they’re bringing grading for equity to life.

Cultural and language diversity have an impact on how students are able to demonstrate what they know and understand — but how do implicit or institutional biases impact how we interpret and evaluate student learning? Dr. Sherrish Holloman returns this week to talk with us about the importance and complexity of culturally responsive grading.