“When you look at the distance learning research, very little has been carried out on young students, even below middle school,” said Brown University’s Schwartz, who is a member of the committee that wrote the report and is also running a project that provides research to school leaders who are trying to make decisions during the pandemic. “Few people were even considering that it could be considered with kids this young.”
- | AP News
- | FutureEd
With teachers suddenly thrust into remote learning last spring, what impact did that have on their sense of success and their students’ engagement? Researchers Matthew Kraft of Brown University and FutureEd, Nicole Simon of CUNY, and Melissa Arnold Lyon of Brown University explored the work-from-home conditions during COVID-19 in a new working paper, Sustaining a Sense of Success: The Importance of Teacher Working Conditions During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- | The Valley Breeze
Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation to a Brown University professor, a high-flying new robotics curriculum is coming to high schools across Rhode Island.
The curriculum teaches students the basics of robotics in the process of building and programming their own autonomous aerial drones. It was originally developed as a college class by Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown. The NSF grant enabled Tellex to adapt the curriculum for high schoolers and provide schools at no cost with the drone parts needed to teach it. This past summer, Tellex trained teachers at Mount Saint Charles to teach the course that will be offered this fall at the school.
- | Education Week
In the current pandemic reality, educators can improve learning, we believe, by finding better ways to use and structure students' work time. That's true whether learning is fully remote via computers, phones, or packets or whether it includes in-person instruction.
When in-person schooling ended abruptly this spring, the learning opportunities then available to students varied enormously. Some students received no distance instruction, and others got a hodgepodge of a synchronous virtual classroom, asynchronous online activities, and worksheets and packets. Educators scrambled to keep a semblance of school going till normal returned.
- | Principal Matters - William D. Parker
- | Albert Shanker InstituteTeachers are used to playing many different roles, but this year they are facing the most complex challenges of their careers. They are being asked to be public health experts. Tech support specialists. Social workers to families reeling from the effects of layoffs and illness. Masters of distance learning and trauma-responsive educational practices. And they are being asked to take on these new responsibilities against a backdrop of rising COVID-19 cases in many parts of the country, looming budget cuts for many school districts, and a hyper-polarized political debate over the return to school.
- | Education Week
The spring semester, in which schools across the country closed their doors and teachers pivoted to remote instruction on a dime, was challenging for everyone involved. But a new survey shows that teachers' sense of success dramatically declined—a troubling sign, since many schools have started the new school year remotely, too.
But there is some good news: Teachers who had supportive school leadership were the least likely to experience a dip in their sense of success.
- | Education WeekNew research is already showing major setbacks to academic achievement in the months of disrupted schooling forced by COVID-19, with estimates that some students will have lost as much as a full school year’s worth of learning gains. How can districts and schools effectively measure and diagnose the learning losses? What types of interventions and staffing changes can be deployed to address the losses?
- | Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
- | The 74Individual or small group instruction is crucial to successful in-person special education and will be key to making interventions effective in distance learning. Recommendations from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, part of the EdResearch for Recovery Project, include having paraprofessionals take over scoring exams and completing paperwork to free up special education teachers to use their specialized expertise in one-on-one settings.
- | Education Week
One-on-one tutoring is the original “personalized learning,” dating back centuries. Along with the Socratic seminar, it may be among the oldest pedagogies still in existence. And as it turns out, it is probably the single most powerful strategy for responding to learning loss.
Increasingly, top education researchers agree that tutoring programs for students who lost ground over the last six months should be a top priority for federal investment. There is potential, they say, for such a program to help ease unemployment. After all, the economic downturn means there’s a glut of talented college graduates and other degree holders who might...
- | Results for America
Today, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and Results for America released two new EdResearch for Recovery briefs from leading education researchers addressing important COVID-related challenges facing policymakers, educators, and parents: distance learning and supporting immigrant students during COVID-19.