Sure, you can Zoom someone in on your laptop or chat over WhatsApp. But when you go out to an event or interview you come back with so much more.
Source link
Tag: story
-
For a great story, get out and report
-
In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
I was conferencing with a group of students when I heard the excitement building across my third grade classroom. A boy at the back table had been working on his catapult project for over an hour through our science lesson, into recess, and now during personalized learning time. I watched him adjust the wooden arm for what felt like the 20th time, measure another launch distance, and scribble numbers on his increasingly messy data sheet.
“The longer arm launches farther!” he announced to no one in particular, his voice carrying the matter-of-fact tone of someone who had just uncovered a truth about the universe. I felt that familiar teacher thrill, not because I had successfully delivered a physics lesson, but because I hadn’t taught him anything at all.
Last year, all of my students chose a topic they wanted to explore and pursued a personal learning project about it. This particular student had discovered the relationship between lever arm length and projectile distance entirely through his own experiments, which involved mathematics, physics, history, and data visualization.
Other students drifted over to try his longer-armed design, and soon, a cluster of 8-year-olds were debating trajectory angles and comparing medieval siege engines to ancient Chinese catapults.
They were doing exactly what I dream of as an educator: learning because they wanted to know, not because they had to perform.
Then, just recently, I read about the American Federation of Teachers’ new $23 million partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train educators how to use AI “wisely, safely and ethically.” The training sessions would teach them how to generate lesson plans and “microwave” routine communications with artificial intelligence.
My heart sank.
As an elementary teacher who also conducts independent research on the intersection of AI and education, and writes the ‘Algorithmic Mind’ column about it for Psychology Today, I live in the uncomfortable space between what technology promises and what children actually need. Yes, I use AI, but only for administrative work like drafting parent newsletters, organizing student data, and filling out required curriculum planning documents. It saves me hours on repetitive tasks that have nothing to do with teaching.
I’m all for showing educators how to use AI to cut down on rote work. But I fear the AFT’s $23 million initiative isn’t about administrative efficiency. According to their press release, they’re training teachers to use AI for “instructional planning” and as a “thought partner” for teaching decisions. One featured teacher describes using AI tools to help her communicate “in the right voice” when she’s burned out. Another says AI can assist with “late-night lesson planning.”
That sounds more like outsourcing the foundational work of teaching.
Watching my student discover physics principles through intrinsic curiosity reminded me why this matters so much. When we start relying on AI to plan our lessons and find our teaching voice, we’re replacing human judgment with algorithmic thinking at the very moment students need us most. We’re prioritizing the product of teaching over the process of learning.
Most teachers I talk to share similar concerns about AI. They focus on cheating and plagiarism. They worry about students outsourcing their thinking and how to assess learning when they can’t tell if students actually understand anything. The uncomfortable truth is that students have always found ways to avoid genuine thinking when we value products over process. I used SparkNotes. Others used Google. Now, students use ChatGPT.
The problem is not technology; it’s that we continue prioritizing finished products over messy learning processes. And as long as education rewards predetermined answers over curiosity, students will find shortcuts.
That’s why teachers need professional development that moves in the opposite direction. They need PD that helps them facilitate genuine inquiry and human connection; foster classrooms where confusion is valued as a precursor to understanding; and develop in students an intrinsic motivation.
When I think about that boy measuring launch distances with handmade tools, I realize he was demonstrating the distinctly human capacity to ask questions that only he wanted to address. He didn’t need me to structure his investigation or discovery. He needed the freedom to explore, materials to experiment with, and time to pursue his curiosity wherever it led.
The learning happened not because I efficiently delivered content, but because I stepped back and trusted his natural drive to understand.
Children don’t need teachers who can generate lesson plans faster or give AI-generated feedback, but educators who can inspire questions, model intellectual courage, and create communities where wonder thrives and real-world problems are solved.
The future belongs to those who can combine computational tools with human wisdom, ethics, and creativity. But this requires us to maintain the cognitive independence to guide AI systems rather than becoming dependent on them.
Every time I watch my students make unexpected connections, I’m reminded that the most important learning happens in the spaces between subjects, in the questions that emerge from genuine curiosity, in the collaborative thinking that builds knowledge through relationships. We can’t microwave that. And we shouldn’t try.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on AI in education, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
After Hechinger story, Illinois passes law requiring hospitals to connect parents of premature infants with life-changing therapies
Illinois hospital staff will soon be required by law to refer parents of severely premature infants to services that can help prevent years of intensive and expensive therapy later, when the children are older. The new law follows reporting from The Hechinger Report that exposed how hospitals often fail to connect many eligible parents to these opportunities for their children after they leave neonatal intensive care units.
Earlier this year, Hechinger contributor Sarah Carr wrote about how, across the country, far too few parents are made aware of the kinds of therapies their babies are entitled to under federal law. Such early intervention services can ultimately reduce the need for these children to require costly special education support as schoolchildren.
Carr noted: “Federal law says children with developmental delays, including newborns with significant likelihood of a delay, can get early intervention from birth to age 3. States design their own programs and set their own funding levels, however. They also set some of the criteria for which newborns are automatically eligible, typically relying on qualifying conditions like Down syndrome or cerebral palsy, extreme prematurity or low birthweight. Nationally, far fewer infants and toddlers receive the therapies than should. The stats are particularly bleak for babies under the age of 1: Just 1 percent of these infants get help. Yet an estimated 13 percent of infants and toddlers likely qualify.”
After the Hechinger Report story was published, Illinois state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr authored legislation to require that hospitals distribute materials informing parents of premature and low birth weight babies about their eligibility for early intervention therapies. The bill also required that hospitals make a nurse or physical therapist available to explain these rights to families.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
“The problem is that these families often don’t know about these services,” Yang Rohr said last spring, after her chamber passed the bill. “So this bill improves that early intervention process by requiring NICU staff to share information about these services and requires hospital staff to write a referral to these programs for families that are eligible.”
Illinois Representative Janet Yang Rohr Credit: ILGA Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed that bill into law earlier this month. It takes effect in January.
Carr also wrote: “The stakes are high for these fragile, rapidly growing babies and their brains. Even a few months of additional therapy can reduce a child’s risk of complications and make it less likely that they will struggle with talking, moving and learning down the road. In Chicago and elsewhere, families, advocates and physicians say a lot of the failures boil down to overstretched hospital and early intervention delivery systems that are not always talking with families very effectively, or with each other hardly at all. ‘They really put the onus of helping your child get better outcomes on you,’ said Jaclyn Vasquez, an early childhood consultant who has had three babies of her own spend time in the NICU.”
“Early intervention is life-changing for many families, as these programs provide critical services and therapies as children develop,” Illinois state Sen. Ram Villivalam said when the bill was sent to Pritzker. “But, these services can only benefit those they are able to reach, which means uplifting the program and expanding its outreach to those who need it is imperative.”
Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at [email protected].
This story about premature infants was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
-
AI teacher tools display racial bias when generating student behavior plans, study finds
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows.
These findings come from a report on the risks of bias in artificial intelligence tools published Wednesday by the non-profit Common Sense Media. Researchers specifically sought to evaluate the quality of AI teacher assistants — such as MagicSchool, Khanmingo, Curipod, and Google Gemini for Education — that are designed to support classroom planning, lesson differentiation, and administrative tasks.
Common Sense Media found that while these tools could help teachers save time and streamline routine paperwork, AI-generated content could also promote bias in lesson planning and classroom management recommendations.
Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, said the problems identified in the study are serious enough that ed tech companies should consider removing tools for behavior intervention plans until they can improve them. That’s significant because writing intervention plans of various sorts is a relatively common way teachers use AI.
After Chalkbeat asked about Common Sense Media’s findings, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday that Google Classroom has turned off the shortcut to Gemini that prompts teachers to “Generate behavior intervention strategies” to do additional testing.
However, both MagicSchool and Google, the two platforms where Common Sense Media identified racial bias in AI-generated behavior intervention plans, said they could not replicate Common Sense Media’s findings. They also said they take bias seriously and are working to improve their models.
School districts across the country have been working to implement comprehensive AI policies to encourage informed use of these tools. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have partnered with the American Federation of Teachers to provide free training in using AI platforms. The Trump Administration also has encouraged greater AI integration in the classroom. However, recent AI guidelines released by the U.S. Department of Education have not directly addressed concerns about bias within these systems.
About a third of teachers report using AI at least weekly, according to a national survey conducted by the Walton Family Foundation in cooperation with Gallup. A separate survey conducted by the research organization Rand found teachers specifically report using these tools to help develop goals for Individualized Education Program — or IEP — plans. They also say they use these tools to shape lessons or assessments around those goals, and to brainstorm ways to accommodate students with disabilities.
Torney said Common Sense Media isn’t trying to discourage teachers from using AI in general. The goal of the report is to encourage more awareness of potential uses of AI teacher assistants that might have greater risks in the classroom.
“We really just want people to go in eyes wide open and say, ‘Hey these are some of the things that they’re best at and these are some of the things you probably want to be a little bit more careful with,’” he said.
Common Sense Media identified AI tools that can generate IEPs and behavior intervention plans as high risk due to their biased treatment of students in the classroom. Using MagicSchool’s Behavior Intervention Suggestions tool and the Google Gemini “Generate behavior intervention strategies tool,” Common Sense Media’s research team ran the same prompt about a student who struggled with reading and showed aggressive behavior 50 times using white-coded names and 50 times using Black-coded names, evenly split between male- and female-coded names.
The AI-generated plans for the students with Black-coded names didn’t all appear negative in isolation. But clear differences emerged when those plans from MagicSchool and Gemini were compared with plans for students with white-coded names.
For example, when prompted to provide a behavior intervention plan for Annie, Gemini emphasized addressing aggressive behavior with “consistent non-escalating responses” and “consistent positive reinforcement.” Lakeesha, on the other hand, should receive “immediate” responses to her aggressive behaviors and positive reinforcement for “desired behaviors,” the tool said. For Kareem, Gemini simply said, “Clearly define expectations and teach replacement behaviors,” with no mention of positive reinforcement or responses to aggressive behavior.
Torney noted that the problems in these AI-generated reports only became apparent across a large sample, which can make it hard for teachers to identify. The report warns that novice teachers may be more likely to rely on AI-generated content without the experience to catch inaccuracies or biases. Torney said these underlying biases in intervention plans “could have really large impacts on student progression or student outcomes as they move across their educational trajectory.”
Black students are already subject to higher rates of suspension than their white counterparts in schools and more likely to receive harsher disciplinary consequences for subjective reasons, like “disruptive behavior.” Machine learning algorithms replicate the decision-making patterns of the training data that they are provided, which can perpetuate existing inequalities. A separate study found that AI tools replicate existing racial bias when grading essays, assigning lower scores to Black students than to Asian students.
The Common Sense Media report also identified instances when AI teacher assistants generated lesson plans that relied on stereotypes, repeated misinformation, and sanitized controversial aspects of history.
A Google spokesperson said the company has invested in using diverse and representative training data to minimize bias and overgeneralizations.
“We use rigorous testing and monitoring to identify and stop potential bias in our AI models,” the Google spokesperson said in an email to Chalkbeat. “We’ve made good progress, but we’re always aiming to make improvements with our training techniques and data.”
On its website, MagicSchool promotes its AI teaching assistant as “an unbiased tool to aid in decision-making for restorative practices.” In an email to Chalkbeat, MagicSchool said it has not been able to reproduce the issues that Common Sense Media identified.
MagicSchool said their platform includes bias warnings and instructs users not to include student names or other identifying information when using AI features. In light of the study, it is working with Common Sense to improve its bias detection systems and design tools in ways that encourage educators to review AI generated content more closely.
“As noted in the study, AI tools like ours hold tremendous promise — but also carry real risks if not designed, deployed, and used responsibly,” MagicSchool told Chalkbeat. “We are grateful to Common Sense Media for helping hold the field accountable.”
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on AI, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
The move from principal to district leader was fraught–here’s what I missed the most
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
I didn’t expect to grieve.
I knew taking a central office role meant trading the school building for a district badge. I knew the days would be filled with policy, meetings, and personnel issues. What I didn’t know was how much I would miss morning announcements, front office chatter, and the small but sacred chaos of classroom life.
When I accepted my central office role at Knox County Schools nearly three years ago, I heard words of congratulations and encouragement, and a lot of “You’ll be great at this.” What I didn’t hear was, “You’re going to miss the cafeteria noise” or “You’ll feel phantom pain for your walkie and reach for it like it’s still there.” No one warned me I’d find myself lingering too long during school visits, trying to feel like I still belong.
What I lost wasn’t just proximity; it was identity.
As a principal, I was part of everything. Students shouted greetings across the parking lot. Parents stopped me in the grocery store to ask about bus routes or share weekend news. Teachers popped into my office with questions or just to drop off a piece of cake from the lounge. I wasn’t above the work. I was in it. I was woven into the messy, beautiful rhythm of a school day.
Shifting to the central office changed not just the pace of my day, but the feel of the work. The space was quieter, the communication more deliberate. There are no morning announcements. No car rider line and morning high-fives from kids. No spontaneous TikTok dances during class change. I moved from the rhythm of a living, breathing school to a place where school leadership feels more technical, more filtered, and more removed.
The relationships changed, too. As a principal, you’re not just part of a team; you’re a part of a family. You laugh together, carry each other’s burdens, and share both the stress and the wins. Move into a district role, and you’re now “from downtown,” even if your heart still lives on campus. You walk into buildings with a badge that means something different, and the conversations shift just enough for you to notice.
None of this means the central office work doesn’t matter. It does. Or that I don’t love it. I do. Central office work gives me a systems-level view of how our schools function. I find purpose in improving not just individual outcomes, but the structures that guide them.
Still, the change in relational gravity caught me off guard. And once the initial disorientation passed, it left me with a deeper concern: How will I stay connected to how the work is actually experienced and carried out in schools if I’m no longer living in it each day?
At first, I told myself it was just a learning curve, that it would pass, that I’d find new rhythms soon enough. And I did — but not before realizing that central office leadership requires a different kind of muscle. One I hadn’t needed before.
As a principal, I lived in fast feedback loops. I saw the effects of my decisions by lunchtime. I knew which teachers were having a hard week, which student needed extra eyes, which parent was about to call. Even hard conversations came with a certain clarity because I was close to the context and knew the culture I wanted to build.
At the district level, the impact is broader but harder to track. The wins take longer to see. The feedback is quieter.
I had to become more intentional about noticing what I could no longer see. That meant listening differently during school visits, paying closer attention to what leaders were navigating, and asking better questions. Not just about what was happening, but what it was costing them to make it happen.
One of the advantages of working at a systems level is being able to recognize patterns across multiple settings. They can reveal root causes that individual concerns might never expose. That clarity opens the door to more aligned, lasting support.
I began thinking less about whether expectations were clear and more about whether they were sustainable. My role was not to direct the work but to support the people carrying it out.
These changes didn’t come naturally. They came because I didn’t want to become a leader who made good decisions in theory but stayed out of touch in practice. I didn’t want to lead by spreadsheet, even though color-coded tabs bring me great joy. I wanted to lead by understanding.
Eventually, I began to see that even though I was no longer in the thick of the school day, I could still choose to stay connected — to show up, to ask real questions, to build trust not just through policy, but through presence.
The classroom educators and school leaders I supported didn’t need someone who had knowledge of what it was like to be a teacher or principal. They needed someone who remembered what it felt like to be one. Someone who hadn’t forgotten the rush of the morning bell or the weight of a tough parent meeting or the impossible feeling of juggling school culture, teacher evaluations, instructional priorities, and a leaky roof all before noon.
I think back often to my first year in central office. The silence. The absence of bells and kids and chaos. The invisible weight of missing something no one warned me I would lose. I remember walking through a school one afternoon and instinctively reaching for my walkie talkie. It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there. But the reflex reminded me of something important: I still wanted to be tuned in.
Leadership doesn’t have to grow lonelier as it grows broader. But staying connected takes intention. It takes habits, not just memories.
I didn’t expect to grieve. But I’m grateful I did. Because grief has a way of reminding you what still deserves your presence.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on district management, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
National AI training hub for educators to open, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
More than 400,000 K-12 educators across the country will get free training in AI through a $23 million partnership between a major teachers union and leading tech companies that is designed to close gaps in the use of technology and provide a national model for AI-integrated curriculum.
The new National Academy for AI Instruction will be based in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, and provide workshops, online courses, and hands-on training sessions. This hub-based model of teacher training was inspired by work of unions like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters that have created similar training centers with industry partners, according to AFT President Randi Weingarten.
“Teachers are facing huge challenges, which include navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely,” Weingarten said at a press conference Tuesday announcing the initiative. “The question was whether we would be chasing it or whether we would be trying to harness it.”
The initiative involves the AFT, UFT, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic.
The Trump administration has encouraged AI integration in the classroom. More than 50 companies have signed onto a White House pledge to provide grants, education materials, and technology to invest in AI education.
In the wake of federal funding cuts to public education and the impact of Trump’s sweeping tax and policy bill on schools, Weingarten sees this partnership with private tech companies as a crucial investment in teacher preparation.
“We are actually ensuring that kids have, that teachers have, what they need to deal with the economy of today and tomorrow,” Weingarten said.
The academy will be based in a city where the school system initially banned the use of AI in the classroom, claiming it would interfere with the development of critical thinking skills. A few months later, then-New York City schools Chancellor David Banks did an about-face, pledging to help schools smartly incorporate the technology. He said New York City schools would embrace the potential of AI to drive individualized learning. But concrete plans have been limited.
The AFT, meanwhile, has tried to position itself as a leader in the field. Last year, the union released its own guidelines for AI use in the classroom and funded pilot programs around the country.
Vincent Plato, New York City Public Schools K-8 educator and UFT Teacher Center director, said the advent of AI reminds him of when teachers first started using word processors.
“We are watching educators transform the way people use technology for work in real time, but with AI it’s on another unbelievable level because it’s just so much more powerful,” he said in a press release announcing the new partnership. “It can be a thought partner when they’re working by themselves, whether that’s late-night lesson planning, looking at student data or filing any types of reports — a tool that’s going to be transformative for teachers and students alike.”
Teachers who frequently use AI tools report saving 5.9 hours a week, according to a national survey conducted by the Walton Family Foundation in cooperation with Gallup. These tools are most likely to be used to support instructional planning, such as creating worksheets or modifying material to meet students’ needs. Half of the teachers surveyed stated that they believe AI will reduce teacher workloads.
“Teachers are not only gaining back valuable time, they are also reporting that AI is helping to strengthen the quality of their work,” Stephanie Marken, senior partner for U.S. research at Gallup, said in a press release. “However, a clear gap in AI adoption remains. Schools need to provide the tools, training, and support to make effective AI use possible for every teacher.”
While nearly half of school districts surveyed by the research corporation RAND have reported training teachers in utilizing AI-powered tools by fall 2024, high-poverty districts are still lagging behind their low poverty counterparts. District leaders across the nation report a scarcity of external experts and resources to provide quality AI training to teachers.
OpenAI, a founding partner of the National Academy for AI Instruction, will contribute $10 million over the next five years. The tech company will provide educators and course developers with technical support to integrate AI into classrooms as well as software applications to build custom, classroom-specific tools.
Tech companies would benefit from this partnership by “co-creating” and improving their products based on feedback and insights from educators, said Gerry Petrella, Microsoft general manager, U.S. public policy, who hopes the initiative will align the needs of educators with the work of developers.
In a sense, the teachers are training AI products just as much as they are being trained, according to Kathleen Day, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Day emphasized that through this partnership, AI companies would gain access to constant input from educators so they could continually strengthen their models and products.
“Who’s training who?” Day said. “They’re basically saying, we’ll show you how this technology works, and you tell us how you would use it. When you tell us how you would use it, that is a wealth of information.”
Many educators and policymakers are also concerned that introducing AI into the classroom could endanger student data and privacy. Racial bias in grading could also be reinforced by AI programs, according to research by The Learning Agency.
Additionally, Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California Los Angeles, warned the New York Times that tech firms could use these deals to market AI tools to students and expand their customer base.
This initiative to expand AI access and training for educators was likened to New Deal efforts in the 1930s to expand equal access to electricity by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. By working with teachers and expanding AI training, Lehane hopes the initiative will “democratize” access to AI.
“There’s no better place to do that work than in the classroom,” he said at the Tuesday press conference.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on AI training, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
Three Ways to Give Donation-Minded Visitors a Good Story
In a study of 99,542 donors who supported causes between 2020 and 2024 with gifts totaling less than $5,000 a year (nearly 97 percent of all donors), just 5.7 percent supported education institutions. That’s according to “The Generosity Report: Data-Backed Insights for Resilient Fundraising,” published this April by Neon One, a provider of nonprofit operational technology.
While major gifts will always be a crucial part of higher ed advancement success, it’s important to remember that smaller gifts add up, and during this uncertain time higher ed leaders must prioritize capturing the interest of every could-be donor.
Among the donors studied, nearly 30 percent gave to more than one nonprofit, for a combined average of about $545 in 2024, an increase from $368 in 2020. Many—if they have a good relationship with a nonprofit and are asked—will increase their level of support.
Sharing donation impact stories on a college’s main giving page is an approach not taken enough, in my experience. Typically, the “make a gift” or “give now” link, found prominently on an institution’s homepage, brings a visitor to a form. (“Yes, we’ll take that credit card info now.”) While no one wants to distract anyone from giving online, some colleges are clearly making efforts to inspire and inform giving by sharing how donations are helping students succeed and contributing to research and other efforts benefiting the community or beyond.
In uncovering examples of colleges using engaging narratives on their donation pages, I now have a clear sense of several practices to consider. For anyone asking how an already resource-strapped marketing and comms team is supposed to make time for additional storytelling, here’s some good news: Most institutions are probably already publishing articles that can be gently repurposed for alumni and other friends thinking about making a gift.
Following are three actions to take when the goal is telling impact stories on a main giving page.
- Find (and tweak) or create the content.
Do some sleuthing to locate any articles already written about programs and supports made possible at least in part with donor funding. While giving sites can include articles about major gifts that center around the donor, focusing on individuals or communities that are better because of the initiative is more compelling.
Donation-related video content—although probably needing to be built from scratch—is a great way to highlight real student successes, whether it’s a scholarship that opened up access, emergency funds that allowed a student to stay in school or the excitement of commencement. Minnesota State University, Mankato, recorded accepted students finding out they had received scholarships and students who had benefited from emergency funding sharing how the gift had “saved the day.” Gratitude-focused videos, especially when they use student voices, need not reveal specific personal circumstances.
To help find individuals to feature, some giving pages invite students, alumni, employees and donors to suggest or contribute their own impact stories.
- Provide a mix of content formats and collections.
Slideshows, blown-up quotes and infographics (individual graphics or numbers-driven stories) are a few visual content tactics spotted on giving pages.
Lewis & Clark College tells succinct stories on its giving page through a slideshow with three students sharing how their financial aid offers allowed them to enroll. The Oregon college’s giving page also includes a collection of five featured stats, highlighting how gifts from the past year have made an “immediate impact on the areas of greatest need.” Rather than just presenting the most obvious numbers, such as giving totals, these data points note, for example, the number of potential jobs and internships sourced by the career center, or how many new titles were purchased by the library.
When strategizing about giving page content, consider a series of similar stories that use a standard title or title style. These can even be short first-person pieces, such as “The next decade of [community, achievement, opportunity, gratitude, etc.] begins with you,” a series created for McGill University in Montreal.
To make an impact story most effective at inspiring a gift, be sure to take the extra step of adding a call-to-action message and link within each article. Even institutions doing this tend to be inconsistent about it. Try adding an italicized note at the end, a sentence within the text or a box that explains the related fund, as University of Colorado at Boulder does.
- Be thoughtful about giving page content organization.
Content-rich giving pages don’t start with a gift form or a bunch of stories. Instead, a single large photo or slideshow featuring students and a short, impactful message seems to be the preferred approach.
As a visitor scrolls down, additional content tiers can offer more detail and giving encouragement—such as students expressing gratitude for support. More comprehensive feature articles and/or collections of impact story content tend to appear toward the bottom of the page, with a few teaser stories and often a link to see more. Larger collections of stories can be broken into categories and made searchable.
Some institutions place links to impact story pages in more than one place and include multiple “make a gift” buttons on the main giving page.
A new focus on giving content should also trigger some tweaks to the gift form itself. Does it include a drop-down menu with specific fund options? Can a donor write in where to direct the gift?
Or consider McGill’s approach: Each of five big ideas listed on its giving stories page takes visitors to a gift form, followed by a description of the meaning of that idea, followed by specific stories that bring it to life.
What inspirational success stories could you be sharing with friends who click to donate?
-
Many students decide they’re not a ‘math person’ by the end of elementary school, new study shows
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Roughly half of middle and high schoolers report losing interest in math class at least half the time, and 1 in 10 lack interest nearly all the time during class, a new study shows.
In addition, the students who felt the most disengaged in math class said they wanted fewer online activities and more real-world applications in their math classes.
Those and other findings published Tuesday from the research corporation RAND highlight several ongoing challenges for instruction in math, where nationwide student achievement has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and the gap between the highest and lowest-performing students in math has continued to grow.
Feeling bored in math class from time to time is not an unusual experience, and feeling “math anxiety” is common. However, the RAND study notes that routine boredom is associated with lower school performance, reduced motivation, reduced effort, and increased rates of dropping out of school.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that the students who are the most likely to maintain their interest in math comprehend math, feel supported in math, are confident in their ability to do well in math, enjoy math, believe in the need to learn math, and see themselves as a “math person.”
Dr. Heather Schwartz, a RAND researcher and the primary investigator of the study, noted that the middle and high school years are when students end up on advanced or regular math tracks. Schwartz said that for young students determining their own sense of math ability, “Tracking programs can be a form of external messaging.”
Nearly all the students who said they identified as a “math person” came to that conclusion before they reached high school, the RAND survey results show. A majority of those students identified that way as early as elementary school. In contrast, nearly a third of students surveyed said they never identified that way.
“Math ability is malleable way past middle school,” Schwartz said. Yet, she noted that the survey indicates students’ perception of their own capabilities often remains static.
The RAND study drew on data from their newly established American Youth Panel, a nationally representative survey of students ages 12-21. It used survey responses of 434 students in grades 5-12. Because this was the first survey sent to members of the panel, there is no comparable data on student math interest prior to the pandemic, so it doesn’t measure any change in student interest.
The RAND study found that 26% percent of students in middle and high school reported losing interest during a majority of their math lessons. On the other end of the spectrum, a quarter of students said they never or almost never lost interest in math class.
There weren’t major differences in the findings across key demographic groups: Students in middle and high school, boys and girls, and students of different races and ethnicities reported feeling bored during a majority of math class at similar rates.
Dr. Janine Remillard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and expert in mathematics curriculum, said that in many math classes, “It’s usually four or five students answering all the questions, and then the kids who either don’t understand or are less interested or just take a little bit more time — they just zone out.”
Over 50% of students who lost interest in almost all of their math classes asked for fewer online activities and more real-world problems, the RAND study shows. Schwartz hypothesizes that some online math programs represent a “modern worksheet” and emphasize solo work and repetition. Students who are bored in class instead crave face-to-face activities that focus on application, she said.
During Remillard’s math teacher training classes, she puts students in her math teacher training class into groups to solve math problems. But she doesn’t tell them what strategy to use.
The students are forced to work together in order to understand the process of finding an answer rather than simply repeating a given formula. All of her students typically say that if they had learned math this way, they would think of themselves as a math person, according to Remillard, who was not involved in the RAND study.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on STEM learning, visit eSN’s STEM & STEAM hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
Help us tell the story of how the Trump administration is changing higher education
Since January, President Donald Trump has taken countless steps to transform the nation’s colleges and universities. His administration has cut scientific and medical research, ended efforts to promote diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), introduced newly aggressive policies on loan repayment, revoked visas for international students, and more. While Trump’s battles with Harvard and Columbia have received the most attention, the administration’s actions have had consequences far beyond those two universities.
We want to know how the Trump administration is affecting higher education and life on your campus. What, if any, changes are you seeing at your college or university because of federal policy shifts? In what ways do you see higher education changing?
If you prefer, you can also email us directly at [email protected]. Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at [email protected] or 212-678-4078. Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This story about higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletters.
Source link -
Federal judge blocks Trump’s Education Dept. shutdown, orders reinstatement of laid off staff
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
A federal judge on May 22 issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and said the agency must reinstate the employees who were fired as part of mass layoffs.
After U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the agency’s plans in March to slash its workforce by roughly half, she called it a first step in getting rid of the agency. Trump followed days later with his executive order aiming to eliminate the department, a move he has long wanted.
But only Congress can actually eliminate the department, and the administration’s attempt at getting around that influenced U.S. District Judge Myong Joun’s Thursday ruling.
The Trump administration argued that they implemented agency layoffs to improve “efficiency” and “accountability,” the Massachusetts judge wrote, but then said: “The record abundantly reveals that [the administration’s] true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.”
Joun added: “A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all. This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”
Within hours of the Joun’s ruling, the Trump administration filed an appeal.
“This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families,” Madi Biedermann, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications, wrote in a statement.
Calls for the injunction came from lawsuits filed by the Somerville and Easthampton schools districts in Massachusetts along with the American Federation of Teachers, other education groups, and 21 Democratic attorneys general.
They argued that the gutting of the department rendered the agency incapable of performing many of its core functions required by Congress.
For example, all of the attorneys from the agency’s general counsel office who handle grants for K-12 schools and grants under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, had been fired. The dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights made it difficult to enforce civil rights protections. The department’s Financial Student Aid programs, which provide financial assistance to almost 12.9 million students across approximately 6,100 postsecondary educational institutions, were also hampered.
Trump’s executive order instructed McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
At the same time, the order said McMahon should ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Trump said he would move the agency’s student loan portfolio to the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services would replace the Education Department’s role in “handling special needs.”
Before the layoffs, the Education Department was the smallest of the 15 cabinet-level departments in terms of staffing, according to the judge, with around 4,100 employees. And the plaintiffs said the agency was strained meeting its obligations even then.
The ruling was not based on the employees’ job rights, but rather how the agency was able to fulfill its obligations.
“It’s not about whether employees have a right to a job,” said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor. “It’s about whether the department can fulfill its statutory obligations to the states and to students.”
The case made by former department employees, educational institutions, unions, and educators, Joun wrote, paints “stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten heralded the judge’s ruling, calling it “a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity.”
But Biedermann, from the Education Department, said the ruling was unfair to the Trump administration.
“Once again, a far-left Judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” she said in a statement.
Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on federal policy, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)