The Continuing Educator

“The essence of family literacy is that parents are supported as the first teachers of their children.” Family Literacy is the idea that long after diapers and baby steps, our children have so much to learn by watching, observing, and collaborating with trusted adults at home, particularly when it comes to building a strong foundation for reading with confidence. On this episode, we dive deeper into this idea and share the how and why of building and sustain robust family literacy practices. 

Joining us on this journey are Lauren Bardwell, Senior Manager of Teaching and Learning Solutions at NWEA, and Shiji Mathew, Senior ELA Content Specialist at NWEA.

On this episode, we explore literacy instruction, the science of reading, early childhood literacy, and the differences between skills-focused and knowledge-focused classrooms. Our two guests are passionate leaders in the field: Dr. Lynne Kulich, Director of Early Learning at NWEA, and Natalie Wexler, an education writer and author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System.”

Let’s take a trip to where it all begins, at least academically, with early literacy and numeracy. On this episode, early learning experts Dr. Cindy Jiban and Dr. Tammy Baumann join us to share classroom strategies to help young learners navigate this important season of life. How do we help children master the critical constrained and unconstrained skills necessary to build a solid foundation for more advanced pursuits? How do we balance meeting state and local mandates, particularly for reading, with developing a love for literature, knowledge and oral language? How do we address unfinished learning or intervene early when it’s clear a young learner needs additional support?  The discussion touches on the science of reading, why early numeracy sometimes takes a backseat to early literacy, and how teachers early in their career can hit the ground running in these areas. 

For episode 4, we head to Las Vegas and the nation’s fifth largest school district. NWEA and Clark County School District are longtime partners who recently engaged on developing a robust and holistic professional learning program that could have major implications for school districts throughout the country. Two members of the NWEA professional learning team, Angela Morton and Lindsay Prendergast, join us to give their stories of how the program took shape and their perspective on how it’s helping educators and kids in Las Vegas.

“For many, learning mathematics leads to perceiving the subject as a collection of procedures that are disconnected from any big picture. It’s much like filling a box with puzzle pieces, yet never building the puzzle.”  For this episode, we are joined by Dr. Ted Coe and Anita Brown of NWEA to discuss how educators move beyond "doing math" to thinking about mathematical concepts, with a focus on formative conversation starters. 

Equity is not a buzzword. It’s not a synonym for diversity. So, what is it? Fenesha Hubbard and Joyce Smith of NWEA join the pod to show what schools and classrooms would look like if we truly valued equity in the context of instruction. 

Equity is not a buzzword. It’s not a synonym for diversity. So, what is it? Fenesha Hubbard and Joyce Smith of NWEA join the pod to show what schools and classrooms would look like if we truly valued equity in the context of instruction. 

Welcome to Season 3 of The Continuing Educator, a professional learning podcast for K-12 educators produced by NWEA.  This season, we are bringing in experts in math, ELA, and unfinished learning to examine the bold, creative action teachers and school leaders are taking to help students get back on track academically, socially, and emotionally.

 Two years on from the start of the pandemic and we’re starting to see a glimmer of hope and pieces of normalcy return to our schools and classrooms. But as we move forward, we cannot ignore the lingering impact of pandemic disruptions. From behavioral and social-emotional learning challenges to unfinished learning in core subjects, particularly for our youngest learners, students from traditionally marginalized groups and students in high poverty schools. While educators are accustomed to navigating summer learning loss, the effects of the pandemic are more complex.

This week's guests: 

Dr. Megan Kuhfeld is a Senior Research Scientists with NWEA. In her role she seeks to understand students’ trajectories of academic and social-emotional learning and the school and neighborhood influences that promote optimal growth. Megan’s work covers a range of topics, including  longitudinal growth modeling, achievement gaps, and summer learning loss. Her research has been featured in Education Week, the Los Angeles Times, the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Applied Psychological Measurement.

Dr. Jim Knight is Founder and Senior Partner of Instructional Coaching Group (ICG) and also a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. He has spent more than two decades studying professional learning and instructional coaching.  The pioneering work Jim and his colleagues have conducted has led to many innovations that are now central to professional development in schools. Jim wrote the first major article about instructional coaching for the Journal of Staff Development, and his book Instructional Coaching offered the first extended description of instructional coaching. 

For our final episode on student agency, we thought it was time to help our students set some better goals. So, we brought in Chase Nordengren, senior research scientist at NWEA and author of the forthcoming book, Step Into Student Goal Setting (Corwin, Jan 2022). He's joined by 3rd grade teacher and education innovator Amanda Thornton to discuss how goal setting, with clear learning intentions and plenty of scaffolded support by teachers, can lead to high learning growth and more student agency. As always, there are plenty of tips, actionable strategies, and stories from the classroom. Thank you for joining us this season! 

How do we as educators ensure that the empowering intent of assessment remains front and center, while helping students built self-efficacy skills in tandem with content skills?  In this episode, we present the five principles of assessment empowerment—learner context, learning environments and relationships, appropriate purpose, responsive learning cycles, communication—and offer listeners strategies they can try for each. Our guests are E. Caroline Wylie, principal research scientist and research director in the K12 Teaching, Learning and Assessment center at ETS, and Erin Beard, content design coordinator for NWEA and host of the previous season of The Continuing Educator.