The EDU blog features the powerful stories and experiences of thought leaders who reflect on their time spent in the classroom, facilitating summer learning programs, engaging families in the learning experience, conducting research and more. To lead us into the year ahead, we’ve gathered some of the most inspiring insights and quotes from blog posts of 2019:
“Excellence and equity are inseparable. One cannot exist without the other. We must understand that true achievement requires us to serve each child according to his or her individual needs. Only then can we truly elevate every child.” – from Equity is the Work by Pamela M. Baldwin Ed.D., Superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in Chapel Hill, NC
“The capacity to have a past, present, and future, and to tell, think about, and listen to others’ stories, builds social connectedness and helps people see a way forward. Stories make relationships, and we ground those relationships in place. We want children to be proud of where they come from and learn to tell the stories of their communities and their own lives. When this happens, a child’s world expands.” – from Can Literacy Foster Resilience? by Linda C. Mayes M.D., the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology, Director of the Yale Child Study Center, and a steering committee member of the Yale Child Study Center–Scholastic Collaborative for Child & Family Resilience
“Reading aloud is a highly valued practice because it fosters language development, genre awareness, literary and informational text knowledge, social-emotional well-being, and more. As leaders in education it’s important we help our schools and districts celebrate the power of the read-aloud all year long.” – from Celebrate the Read-Aloud all Year Long: A Checklist for District Leaders by Pam Allyn, Senior Vice President, Innovation & Development, Scholastic Education
“To become critical thinkers, children need to know that they are worthy and capable of questioning the accuracy and value of information. They need to know that if they apply themselves to issues, they can become skilled and informed enough to make important contributions.” – from The Importance of Critical Thinking for Students of All Ages by Helen Lee Bouygues, founder of the Reboot Foundation
“A relationship with reading nurtures a sense of curiosity, develops empathy, enhances academic skills and, perhaps most importantly, creates an understanding among kids that both fiction and real-life stories are available to them to learn from and help decipher their own experience when they need it. This is so vital that we must take active roles to ensure every kid becomes a reader.” – from Access Matters: Reading Role Models and Books by Michael Haggen, Chief Academic Officer, Scholastic Education
“At every grade level, being able to articulate and effectively express your thinking, justify your thoughts, or win an argument, is an academic skill as well as a life skill. We need to make this integration of skills clear and explicit for our students, offering them common academic language to use throughout the day, in various content areas, and in any classroom.” – A Writing Strategy for All Content Areas by Grace Long, author of ACE: Short-Response Writing
“Engaging parents and caregivers in the idea that learning doesn’t just happen when a child starts kindergarten can be a life changing experience for everyone.” – from Turning Everyday Activities Into Learning Opportunities by Dawn Gerundo, Valley of the Sun United Way
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