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McREL
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Our expert researchers, evaluators, and veteran educators synthesize information gleaned from our research and blend it with best practices gathered from schools and districts around the world to bring you insightful and practical ideas that support changing the odds of success for you and your students. By aligning practice with research, we mix professional wisdom with real world experience to bring you unexpectedly insightful and uncommonly practical ideas that offer ways to build student resiliency, close achievement gaps, implement retention strategies, prioritize improvement initiatives, build staff motivation, and interpret data and understand its impact.

Mar 08
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Research Matters: Moving from absent to present

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What if poor student engagement indicated a problem not with the student, but with the school environment? That would actually be good news for educators because there are so many relatively simple things they can do to improve the environment, McREL’s Susan Shebby and Tameka Porter write in the March Research Matters column of ASCD’s Educational Leadership. One step they recommend: Talking to students as fellow human beings who have interesting things to say, rather than merely expecting them to recall content, can work wonders.

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Mar 05
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Principals: What you can do now to make next school year great

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Back in the day, when I was just starting out as a new principal, I was told by my supervisor to work three months in advance. I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, but quickly realized that if you don’t plan your leadership work three months in advance to control the things you can control, then the many things you can’t control will get in the way of accomplishing anything. Because of all the changes we’ve all experienced in the last year, I’m going to literally double down on my mentor’s advice for the 2021–22 school year: Start planning six months ahead. In other words, right now.

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Mar 01
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Designing units that challenge and engage remote learners

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Part 8 of 8 | Over the last seven weeks I’ve reviewed the phases of learning, and how teachers can use them to create learning that sticks in an online environment. To design experiences that both challenge and engage remote learners, you’ll likely find it’s easiest to begin with the end in mind. To wrap up this blog series, here’s a list of questions to guide you through the process.

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Feb 22
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Helping remote learners extend and apply learning

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Part 7 of 8 | Extending and applying learning—using new knowledge and skills to solve complex problems, synthesize learning, or develop original ideas—helps us to weave new learning into richer, more complex neural connections in our brains, thus making learning more meaningful and engaging. Often, though, this final phase of learning is glossed over in many classrooms. We teach something. Students commit it to memory. We test them on it. Then we move onto something else. It’s a time-honored approach—that doesn’t work.

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Feb 16
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Helping remote learners practice and reflect on their learning

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Part 6 of 8 | Once students have focused on new knowledge and begun to make sense of it, there’s one surefire way for it to find a home in long-term memory: repetition. To commit new learning to memory, we must return to it on multiple occasions spread over days or even weeks. This is the practice and reflect phase of learning. We repeat new learning to store it in our memory while at the same time reflecting on and receiving feedback on our progress to shore up gaps in our knowledge or skills.

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Feb 09
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We’re ‘ALL’ in on effective instructional supports for multilingual EL students

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For years, I’ve been helping classroom teachers and EL specialists learn to support multilingual students who are learning English, so it may surprise you that some of my favorite resources for EL teaching and learning aren’t specifically designed for “learning English” in the narrow sense of conquering vocabulary. That’s because every student, of every background, in every location is in school to learn a sort of foreign tongue: academic language.

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