Hard Thinking on Soft Skills
A recent report from Brookings explores the research behind and the challenges with schools taking up the responsibility of enhancing students’ soft skills. Below is a brief summary of the …
Compendium of Social-Behavioral Research
Between 2002 and 2013, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) funded over 245 projects focused on social-behavioral competencies or outcomes (e.g., social skills, dropout prevention) through the National Center for …
How Students Perceive Their Relationships with Teachers
Education research consistently shows that positive teacher-student relationships are an important dimension of effective teaching and contribute to students’ success in school and life. Students who have strong relationships with …
Don’t Quit on Me: The Power of Relationships for High School Graduation
Don’t Quit on Me: What Young People Who Left School Say about the Power of Relationships examines, from the perspective of young people themselves, the roles that relationships with adults …
Developing Teachers’ Understanding of the Social Contexts of their Classrooms
In a piece for the Albert Shanker Institute, researcher John Lane contends that in teachers’ typical learning opportunities, reforms are reduced to a set of strategies that “work” across settings, …
Educating the Whole Student through Social Emotional Learning
Increasingly, researchers and educators recognize that schools cannot focus solely on students’ academic learning to improve achievement. They also must nurture students’ psychological development, often described as social emotional learning …
The Importance of Social and Emotional Skills for Student Learning
Much has been made in recent years about the importance of “grit” for student success and achievement. Grit has been a term that broadly includes such concepts as persistence, perseverance, …
Resources on the Social Side of Education Reform
The folks over at Shanker Blog have been writing recently about how education reform cannot happen in a vacuum. Schools and the people in them are inherently social, so approaching …
School Climate Change
According to a new Alliance for Excellent Education report, supporting great teaching is key to a positive school climate and academic success for at-risk students. With schools implementing higher academic …
Climate Change: Rigorous Curriculum for All
A new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education examines how implementing rigorous and engaging curriculum aligned with college- and career-ready standards fosters positive school climates in which students are …