April 2023 | Student engagement must go beyond the illusion of engagement to support deep thinking, education experts Jim Heal and Bryan Goodwin write in an article titled “Moving from Engagement to Deeper Thinking.” The article, featured in the April issue of ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine, states that once educators
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April 2023 | Critical thinking doesn’t happen naturally. It’s a skill everyone must learn. The good news is it can be taught in all content areas and age levels. McREL’s CEO Bryan Goodwin highlights three teaching strategies that are proven to help educators promote critical thinking in their classrooms
February 2023 | When reviewing school curriculum and its impact on student achievement, asking the right questions matters, writes McREL’s CEO Bryan Goodwin in his February “Research Matters” column in ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine.
January 2023 | McREL’s Bryan Goodwin and Kristin Rouleau address the topic of what’s new in The New Classroom Instruction That Works in this ASCD blog post, A New Distillation of What Works in Classroom Instruction. The latest edition is truly new, from top to bottom, they write. The book incorporates insights into the science of learning and highlights strategies proven to work toward ensuring a more equitable
December 7, 2022 | McREL Senior Consultant Cheryl Abla joined other industry experts in answering a question from teacher and author Larry Ferlazzo for his EdWeek Classroom Q&A column. This edition focused on advice for first-year teachers.
The question: What advice would you give to yourself as a first-year teacher?
Nov. 1, 2022 | Hope is more than just a feel-good emotion; it’s a powerful mental state and predictor of student success, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin writes in his most recent Educational Leadership column.
Research shows that students excel when they can craft good goals, chart clear paths to achieve them, and fuel their determination with the belief that they can accomplish those goals.
November 30, 2022—ASCD, the nation’s leading association for K–12 educator professional development, announced the publication of The New Classroom Instruction That Works: The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, copublished with McREL International. Authored by Bryan Goodwin and Kristin Rouleau, the new streamlined edition distills McREL’s comprehensive review and analysis of hundreds of scientific studies into 14 easy-to-implement and proven instructional strategies that yield significant positive effects for a diverse array of students.
August 2, 2022 – In this Edutopia post, McREL instructional expert Cheryl Abla gives teachers several quick and easy tips for creating a “just right” classroom environment during the first five days of school.
With the school year starting soon across the U.S., teachers in any school can use these strategies and activities to help all of their students feel welcomed in the class and prepared to have a productive, engaged, and rewarding school year.
Several members of McREL’s Research & Evaluation team contributed to a special series about preK–12 program evaluation on the American Evaluation Association’s 365 Blog. The blog provides “a tip a day by and for evaluators.” In posts published May 1-4, they covered improving one’s listening skills, conducting research in ways that promote deep collaboration with Native Hawaiian communities, and finding inputs other than the normal data points to tell the true story of how a program impacts a school community.
March 31, 2022 | Teacher/blogger Larry Ferlazzo asked panelists on his Education Week blog, Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo, about their best PD experience, and McREL Senior Managing Consultant Tonia Gibson shared hers: peer coaching with a colleague from a different grade level. The teachers at her school in Australia (where there are no formal, high-stakes evaluations) found that a little distance made it easier to focus objectively on teaching practices. Visiting one another’s classrooms four times a year, the peer coaches learned to focus on what students were learning as opposed to what they were doing.