Coaching Resources

In this Education Week article, Mark Lieberman interviews Connie Kim, the middle-school principal of a K-12 school in Hong Kong that has a little more perspective on remote learning than U.S. schools: it’s been closed for in-person instruction for more than two months.

“In an era of social distancing, we’re all searching for some form of social closeness right now,” says elementary teacher Paul France in this Edutopia article. When he previously worked with an ed tech company and a network of micro-schools, France learned that “many digital tools have dehumanizing effects: they chip away at human connection, limit opportunities for heterogeneous groupings and cross-ability collaboration, and have kids turning toward screens instead of their teachers and fellow learners.”

In this Edutopia article, Sarah Gonser reports on strategies she curated from interviews with teachers about how they stay connected with their students during school closures.

In this article in The Learning Professional, Thomas Guskey (University of Louisville) tackles the tricky issue of whether teachers believe they can effectively reach all children. Citing a recent study, Guskey says that even when teacher teams roll up their sleeves and look at students’ work – seemingly the best time to reflect on what’s not working and how to improve instruction – teachers mostly attribute results to students’ behavior, effort, and family background. Why, asks Guskey, do teachers have such modest expectations for their impact on many students, and how can this self-fulfilling dynamic be changed?