One creative writing exercise might be to have students annotate in the voices of a characters from a novel being read.

is the ability to include multimedia elements in the composition process.

-Students may be motivated by interaction with their peers

students can leave voice or video comments alongside a text.

No SEL curriculum or activity is as meaningful as the true relationships we build with our students.

Help your students acknowledge the good and the bad. 

Key phrases: “I hear you,” “That sounds really hard,” or “I can hear how worried you are.”

However you check in, make space for kids to share the good and the bad.

Maybe this is through a virtual circle or advisory meeting, an asynchronous group check-in like rose and thorn, or individual phone calls or letters (working through your class list a few times over the coming weeks).

This might mean setting an auto-response on your email to let students, families, and coworkers know that you only answer school emails between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

In 10 years, students will likely not remember the academic work they completed during this pandemic, but we can hope they will remember feeling cared for by their teachers, families, and communities.

Social and emotional skills such as critical thinking, perseverance and self-control are predictors of all sorts of things, from academic achievement and employment to health outcomes and the likelihood of ending up in jail. And whereas older children can be plonked in front of a computer, younger ones learn far more when digital learning—whether reading an e-book or watching a video—is adult-supervised.

every year of education is associated with an increase in annual earnings of roughly 10%,

learning loss started when schools closed might have lost up to a year’s attainment.

The school now opens its doors for 15 from this group three mornings a week and has found other ways to help the remaining 13, such as getting assistance from their neighbours.

Also important is how used students are to being given their own projects, says Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, a club of rich countries. “The real issue is if you’ve been spoon-fed by a teacher every day and are now told to go alone, what will motivate you?”

(95%) of 15-year-olds have access to a computer at home, regardless of family background. In America that is true for virtually all students in the wealthiest quartile but only three in four of those in the poorest. In Mexico it’s 94% and 29% respectively. To make matters worse, poorer kids tend to have more siblings to squabble with over the use of what devices there are.

Fears are growing that the “summer-learning slide”, which sees knowledge lost over the summer break, will become an avalanche for some.

In America third-graders affected by weather-related closures do less well in state assessment exams.

Have students identify formal textual elements and broader social and historical contexts at work in specific passages.

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and then prompt them to develop a short argument based on such evidence.

At the end of the year, the students decided to create public service announcements that matched the aesthetic of PSAs produced by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

My students were able to attend to nuance and sit with contradiction in many ways that I cannot.

Visions of who villains are and what they look like, largely perpetuated by racist stereotyping and media represen-tation, are challenged when the hero looks like someone society has his-torically villainized.