The Continuing Educator

Sharron Stroman gives Jacob & Kailey a guided tour of her journey as a teacher and school leader focused on early literacy. Sharron is an education professional of nearly 3 decades who currently serves as a senior professional learning consultant with NWEA. Topics include the science of reading, resilience as a school leader, and why Sharron returned to school to become a structured literacy dyslexia specialist. 

What are the habits we know that enable teachers to be effective no matter the environment? And how do we build and sustain professional and personal practices that help us rise to every challenge? NWEA Senior Account Manager Piper Nichols stops by to talk to Kailey and Jacob about her new book she co-authored, "Habits of Resilient Educators." Grab your copy here: https://us.corwin.com/books/habits-of-resilient-educators-285205

Today, Jacob is joined by an Alaskan and a Texan: Moon McCarley, Principal at Nondalton School and District Testing Coordinator for The Lake and Peninsula School District, located on the Alaska Peninsula; and Ashley Cruz, State Professional Learning Consultant at NWEA. They discuss how NWEA partners with districts across Alaska to create high-impact professional learning opportunities to expand assessment literacy. Along the way, Moon shares her experience as a Certified Facilitator and talks about how it helped her grow as a leader.

Robyn & Sarah, a mother & daughter teaching duo, stop by to chat with Jacob about what each generation has learned from the other, what's better about teaching today, and what's more challenging. They also talk about Sarah's alternative certification process and why Robyn left teaching—and then came back! 

For this episode, we're once again joined by Dr. Chase Nordengren, principal research lead for Effective Instructional Strategies at NWEA to talk about teacher-led approaches to academic recovery.Chase works closely with leading scholars from around the globe to turn theory into actionable practices to drive instructional improvement. His latest study, High Growth for All, captured ways teachers in one Chicago-area district are leading the academic recovery effort and producing above average academic growth over multiple years for kids across the achievement spectrum  Chase is also the author of Step into Student Goal Setting: A Path to Growth, Motivation, and Agency from Corwin Press. 

“Professional learning should be intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, and data-driven.” Jacob hops from the host's chair to the hot seat as he sits down with Kailey to discuss his journey through the education world to become a leader in professional development for teachers. Starting with his time working with abused & neglected children, Jacob realized how much he would need to continue to grow to best serve his students. After time as a high school math teacher and coach for math educators, Jacob dedicated his career to serving teachers looking to improve their craft. Then, Kailey & Jacob get into the details of what kinds of professional learning teachers need more of now. They talk about why teachers aren't taught about the assessment side of instructional practice and how new attitudes towards data literacy are changing that trend.

Kailey & Jacob are joined by two educators and NWEA content specialists who have thought a lot about how to improves student experiences in science. Kim Baker has been at NWEA for 13 years, and Megan Kuehl has been here for eight. We discuss challenging assumptions about the science classroom and unpack the notion that science is inherently impartial. 

Get ready for a blast of youthful energy and insight in this one-of-a-kind episode of The Continuing Educator! Join Kailey and Jacob as they dive into an engaging discussion with two bright young minds, Harper & Amelia, who are gearing up for their journey through middle school. These two students share their thoughts on how teachers can create a supportive classroom environment and explore ways kids can make a positive impact on their educator. They unravel goal-setting from a student's point of view and share a meaningful glimpse into the world of education through the eyes of those who experience it every day. Harper & Amelia also answer questions like, what back-to-school supply is the most exciting? And, why are people so afraid of math?  It's a conversation that's as fun as it is enlightening as these four explore the dynamics that shape the middle school classroom.

Send your back-to-school tips as a voice memo to social.media@nwea.org — we'll play them on air. Lots of great teaching stories and tips in this one! Two teachers (and longtime friends) join Kailey to get the tea on getting back to school.  They talk back-to-school routines, first week tips, introducing yourself to new families, hitting the wall, relationship-centered learning, and more. And of course: What's on your back-to-school playlist? Thanks to our guests: Shelby Coffin, ELA teacher @ Decatur High School, and Olivia Rocamora, high school Spanish teacher @ the Weber School.

Kailey chats with actor, comedian, and NWEA professional learning lead consultant Nicholas Joe about how, why, and when teachers get laughs in their classroom. Along the way they discuss strategies like how to pivot in the classroom with a “Yes, and…” mindset and how to utilize comedy in your lesson planning. And yes, Nick gets Kailey to do improv!

What a great crowd for our first live show! After discussing their Georgia roots, Jacob and Kailey chat with their guests about choosing the best summer professional learning opportunities and what gets them motivated at a conference. Next, they turn to the new school year and discuss the biggest challenges ahead, including how to scale success across schools and districts.  Kailey also asks a few of her signature lightning-round, light-hearted questions.  Finally, stay tuned for the audience Q&A at the end of the show for your daily dose of teacher inspiration. There may have been some tears of joy in the room… Thanks to our guests, Lindsay Deacon (NWEA) and Marelenise Phillips-Roberts (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Director at Dallas Independent School District).

This was a fun one... because we got to talk to you, our listeners! In this episode: We see how Mr. Potato head can motivate students, one additional limb at a time. We open a big box of costumes in the middle of class. We learn about a teacher who calls students' parents to share good news, and how one student wanted to return the favor.  And finally, we get to hear some incredibly touching stories of students and families letting their teachers know how awesome they are. (Jacob and Kailey get a little misty-eyed.)Special shoutout to all the teachers who called in! If you want to get in on the discussion, we'll be asking for new voicemails soon. Follow NWEA on your favorite social media platforms so you don't miss the opportunity to participate, and if you're headed to Fusion this summer, you can find us there as well. Thanks for listening! 

As a teacher, Misty Hodge wondered: Who makes these assessments I give my students? Are these companies listening to the teachers who use them, or are they just throwing darts in the dark? So she came to NWEA to make sure that teachers like her had a seat at the table. Misty shares her work leading NWEA's partner advisory board and building something teachers can actually use. Then, Kailey and Misty nerd out about MAP Accelerator and how much it helps math teachers.  Misty also shares stories from her time as an educator, including a creative use of a ropes course and a challenging first day as a substitute teacher.  Thanks for listening — don't forget to share, subscribe, and rate us five stars! 

Melissa Lim is a Technology Integration Specialist at Portland Public Schools, but she sees herself first and foremost as a teacher, not an IT professional. In this episode, Melissa chats with Kailey and Jacob about showing kids and teachers what's possible with technology ,and how she makes them more comfortable using it. They cover ChatGPT and its uses in the classroom (like writing better quizzes!) as well as Melissa's work to bridge the digital divide and give all kids at PPS equal access to tech. She shares her rule for deciding when you shouldn't use technology, along with her number one tip for teachers: Don't be afraid to push a new button! You won't break anything (probably).

The science of reading is both a body of research and movement in literacy education. How do we keep those two things connected when they're not always aligned? What are most common myths about literacy instruction, how do we fight them? A roundtable of educators and specialists from NWEA join Jacob & Kailey to talk about how the science of reading works best in classrooms and where both the movement and the research are going.John Luke Bell is Senior Content Designer in Literacy with NWEA. Prior to joining us in 2022, he was a Curriculum Coordinator and English Teacher. He is passionate about solving the problems facing young readers and the people who teach them.Dr. Tiffany Peltier is Lead Learning and Delivery Specialist for literacy at NWEA. She brings over 12 years of experience in the education field, acting as an instructional coach to elementary teachers, and teaching undergraduate pre-service teachers within special education, learning, sciences, and literacy coursework. Dr. Lisa LeBouef is Content Designer in Literacy at NWEA. She has more than a 15 years education as a classroom teacher and literacy coach, as well as a few years at the state agency level as the Supervisor of Literacy Professional Development for the Louisiana Department of Education. 

The elusive practice of classroom differentiation has historically had lots of “shouldas” and “couldas” from experts, but it's always been difficult to do well at scale. Disruptions in formal schooling for all students and educators have only increased the need for good differentiation in the classroom, but there's no easy button. We discuss how differentiation works today — is it getting easier or harder? Are we making it too complicated, or not complicated enough? Our guests share successful practices they've learned from teachers around the country—teachers who walk that thin line between dull routine and total chaos to give kids the right level of voice and choice in their learning. We talk to Tatiana Ciccarelli, a math educator and model teacher from New York City, currently supporting educators around the country through professional learning, and Dr. Chase Nordengren, principal research scientist for effective instruction at NWEA.

What's it like in classrooms right now? The only way to know is to ask a teacher, so we sat down with a first-grade elementary teacher and a sixth-grade social studies & science teacher and listened. Topics include: Modeling respect, making everyone feel included, and being your authentic self in the classroom. We hear stories about how kids (and parents!) can hit you right in the feels and the instructional value of kicking your students' butts in soccer. Plus: Post-its, Post-its, Post-its! (Including both appropriate and inappropriate uses.) 

We're back for Season 4! Yes, *we* — on this episode, Jacob Bruno interviews our new co-host, Kailey Rhodes, about how to establish a real rapport with your students and build a classroom culture where they can trust and thrive. The first step? Ask your kids how they want the class to work for them, and be honest about what you expect in return. Kids can smell inauthenticity. Plus: Tips for when to step in to kids' conflicts with each other, the utility of unicorns and mermaids, and a google-form for hair-adjacent encouragement.We're so excited to have you back with us this season as we talk about putting big ideas to work in the classroom.  Each episode will have experts form the classroom and pros from NWEA's learning and improvement services team sharing what's working for teachers and schools around the country right now. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Thanks for listening! Please rate & review The Continuing Educator on your favorite podcast platform. Season 4 is coming in 2023.In this bonus episode from Season 3, we talk to a working educator about the importance of family literacy and strategies for increasing it. Our guest Martin Silverman is the principal at Salinas Elementary School in Universal City, TX, and has worked as a teacher in both urban and rural schools. From his own experiences growing up, he saw the importance of literacy as a focus in families, and has sought to revitalize that practice in the families of his students.If you enjoy the conversation with Martin, check out his podcast The Second Question.

The ALA defines digital literacy as "the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills."  We discuss the many other definitions of the term and get into what responsibilities educators have to cover this topic.Disciplinary literacy aims to apprentice students into the specialized literacy practices of each of the disciplines—practices usually only developed by those immersed in the creation of knowledge in the disciplines. We discuss why this skill is so important and how it differs from content area reading.Our guest, Laura B. Hansen, is director of Teaching and Learning Connections at NWEA where she focuses on understanding and fostering the relationships between teaching, learning, and assessment to promote literacy for all students.Thank you for joining us on this season of The Continuing Educator!  Please be sure to share the podcast and leave us five star reviews so more educators can hear these conversations. We'll be back with more episodes in Spring 2023. 

“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. 

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.

General education teachers aren't often provided the training they need to effectively reach children with disabilities in their classroom, but there are simple things they can do to gain more expertise at working with these students. In this episode, we discuss information why and how teaching programs fail to prepare gen ed teachers for working with students with disabilities, break down a few common myths about students with disabilities, and give teachers actionable ideas and strategies for building student agency with their entire class. Our guests are two NWEA experts in special education: Douglas Buttorff (content designer) and Elizabeth Barker (accessibility research scientist).

Our education system had been failing our emergent bilingual students since long before the pandemic. How can teachers better serve the emergent bilingual students coming back to the classroom and build their agency as they become proficient?  In this discussion, we cover how to recognize the assets emergent bilingual students bring with them, how to get back into the groove of academic language, and how to make room for both language and communication with English language learners. Our guests are three experts from NWEA (who all happen to be emergent bilingual speakers): Teresa Krastel (Spanish solutions lead), Angela Johnson (research scientist), and Adam Withycombe (content design and development).

In this conversation, we venture into the domain specific ways we, as educators, can empower students within our classrooms. How is building student agency in ELA different than in mathematics or science? How can we leverage our curriculum, content-specific learning progressions and practices to build in students a robust belief in their abilities to master academic content and apply their learning in new contexts? We ask what roles do mathematical practices, next generation science expectations for emerging scientists, and the ELA expectations play in building student agency, then discuss how we as content area teachers leverage our content areas in impactful ways to build, not just content knowledge of students, but the deep belief in themselves to master grade level expectations and beyond.   Our guests are Miah Daughtery (Literacy Director of Content Advocacy and Design at NWEA), Ted Coe (Director of Content Advocacy and Design at NWEA), and Fenesha Hubbard (Content Designer at NWEA) -- all three of whom came to NWEA with years of experience in classrooms.

Setting the conditions within which an environment of student agency is possible is not something that happens by accident. This episode will explore elements of culturally responsive teaching, supportive environments, and the actions that educators and leaders can take to create a space where students belong, feel valued, and thereby are more likely to take risks, make mistakes, and build a sense of self-efficacy that will serve them well in their academic journeys and in their lives beyond school. Our guests: Benjie Howard is Benjie Howard is the executive director of New Wilderness Project, an outdoor education program focused on developing youth leadership for equity and land justice, and he is the co-founder of Youth Equity Stewardship (YES!). Lindsay Prendergast is a former principal, guidance counselor, and special ed teacher who is now at school improvement coach at NWEA. 

At the heart of student agency is engaging students directly in their learning in ways that provide them choice points, skill in navigating formative learning cycles, and increasing levels of expertise to assess, as Royce Sadler famously coined, “Where Am I Now?,” “Where Am I Going?”, and “How Will I Get There?”  This session examines elements of student ‘voice and choice' as critical enabling elements needed to build in students that kind of self-efficacy that will help them thrive and meet their full potential as learners. The conversation centers on practices and routines that are applicable to a number of scenarios and classroom contexts.  Our guests are Myron Dueck, author of Giving Students a Say  and Grading Smarter, Not Harder; and Brooke Mabry, Strategic Content Design Manager at NWEA.

Welcome to season 2 of The Continuing Educator! Teachers have tremendously complex jobs and a constantly shifting ecosystem of expectations, yet despite shifts across so many other areas of educational practice, building student agency remains a key desired classroom outcome that educators generally recognize as an area of need. This conversation will give teacher voice to the importance of student agency, varied practitioner views on the opportunities and challenges related to building student agency, and a frame for the season that will prepare listeners to hear about topics ranging from supportive environments and goal setting to meeting the unique needs of students with disabilities and emergent bilinguals. 

Shifting to grading for learning can have a powerful impact on your students, and whether you're just beginning or you're digging deeper into practices, your persistence will pay off! All students deserve to receive clear, meaningful, growth-focused measures of their learning and, with an aligned purpose you'll be ready to deliver on this goal. The strategies and ideas shared by the experts in this podcast will equip you with the tools for success!

Since the advent of online gradebooks, we've put the tools in students' and parents' hands to regularly view their learning progress. But what happens when those systems work against our grading practices focused on learning, as is often the case? Designing reporting methods that uphold the clear communication around best, most recent evidence and also distinguish between achievement and behavior shouldn't require sophisticated methods. Consider ideas for organizing gradebooks and communicating with students and parents that keep the focus on the learning, not the points!

Grading for learning requires reconsideration of several practices deeply entrenched in tradition, and one of those is the opportunity for students to reassess, or redo a learning activity. If we truly believe our goal as educators is for every student to learn, not to sort, rank or exclude anyone from that opportunity, it's time to recognize why reassessments should be the norm, not the exception. Ken O'Connor and Dr. VaShawn Smith share why this is fundamental for student learning and how to make it work in the everyday classroom.

Traditional grading practices typically incorporate non-learning measures such as behavior and effort into an average. Yet by mixing achievement and behavior, we miscommunicate on both accounts. Students and parents still need information on both, but the critical step is to separate reporting, and Dr. Matt Townsley and NWEA User Experience Designer Chris Thoms will share with us both why this is crucial for equity, and how teachers can put it into action.

To successfully create the conditions where grading for learning practices may thrive, consider first the importance of ensuring student-centered assessment processes. Hear from experts on how the practices of formative assessment are crucial to cultivating a growth-mindset in a safe, respectful classroom environment. By engaging students as co-pilots in the assessment and feedback cycle rather than passengers, we empower learners and learning, which positively impacts student motivation, well-being, self-efficacy, and achievement. 

Let's begin our journey towards better grading practices! Grades have remained a fundamental component of our education system for over a century. Yet despite shifts across so many other areas of educational practice, grading practices have seen little, if any, change to match the demands of modern pedagogy. The pandemic revealed stark flaws in traditional grading protocols and simultaneously presented a profound opportunity for actual change. What should educators, families, and society in general consider around why change is needed and where to begin?