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Collective efficacy occurs when teachers in a school believe that, as a team, they have the power to help their students learn more effectively—and this belief is based on their own shared experiences of success. A culture of collective efficacy does not simply happen; it is built intentionally. I have learned this in my work at Lead by Learning , a nonprofit connected with the Mills College School of Education that partners with schools and districts to foster collective efficacy. At the...

Shelley Paul and Jill Gough had heard that doodling while taking notes could help improve memory and concept retention, but as instructional coaches they were reluctant to bring the idea to teachers without trying it out themselves first. To give it a fair shot, Paul tried sketching all her notes from a two-day conference. By the end, her drawings had improved and she was convinced the approach could work for kids, too. “It causes you to listen at a different level,” said Jill Gough,...

Research is uncovering the benefits of recognizing that you might be wrong, who tends to be more humble, and some hints about how to cultivate this skill. Research on the overconfidence bias shows that people regularly overestimate their abilities, knowledge, and beliefs. For example, when researchers ask people how certain they are that their answers to questions of fact are correct, people’s confidence consistently exceeds the actual accuracy of their answers. Psychologist Scott Plous has...

Discussions about Indigenizing the academy have abounded in Canada over the past few years. And yet, despite the numerous policies and reports that have been written, there is a lack of clarity around what pedagogical methods could help to decolonize our institutions. In Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization , edited by Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong, contributors demonstrate how the academy cannot be decolonized while we still subscribe to the Western idea of mind...

Established in 2006 by Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo, American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL) provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books. Dr. Jean Mendoza joined AICL as a co-editor in 2016. Please visit the website by clicking here, https://americanindiansinchild.../best-books.html?m=1 American Indians in Children's Literature is used by Native and non-Native parents, librarians, teachers, editors, professors, and students. It is...

By Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, October 25, 2021 I n August, Brené Brown, the Houston-based writer, researcher, professor, social worker, podcast host, C.E.O., and consultant-guru to organizations including Pixar, Google, and the U.S. Special Forces, met with a group of graduate students at the McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas at Austin, to talk about emotions. Brown, fifty-five, was wearing a shiny maize blouse, jeans, and a black face mask. It was the first day of...

By Anna Varela, Georgia State University News Hub, October 19, 2021 Georgia State University’s Gerontology Institute has received a $1.58 million grant to support training nursing home staff across the state to improve care for residents with dementia. The training will emphasize new trauma-informed approaches and reducing the use of antipsychotic drugs to manage residents’ symptoms. The three-year project, jointly funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the...

By Usha Lee McFarling, STAT, September 23, 2021 F ueled by the massive health disparities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, health equity research is now in vogue. Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health, after publicly apologizing for giving the field short shrift, recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million for research on the topic. This would seem to be...

Fifteen years ago, Kenny Butler was at a low point. He had just been sentenced to life in prison. Now Butler, 47, is on track to earn his bachelor’s degree through a new program at Pitzer College, a small private liberal arts school in Southern California. The program, which began last December and which the school says is the first of its kind in the nation, is based on Inside Out curriculum — a type of teaching that brings college students and professors into prisons to learn alongside...

© UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser Challenge and crisis have shaped the lives of today's college students. Where do they go from here? Students by the hundreds were streaming through Sather Gate on a brilliant morning last week at UC Berkeley, en route to class, or the library, or the familiar comforts of the Free Speech Café. It was such a pleasant scene, so familiar, and yet for Brianna Rivera, a senior in English, it was skewing a little strange. She was walking to her first class of...

By Alejandra Salgado, Cal Matters, August 23, 2021 This past school year, Madeline Waters struggled to find a way to pay for food while also studying for classes. As a nutrition major at Sacramento State, she wasn’t unfamiliar with what skipping meals could mean for her academic career. So this spring she applied, yet again, for food stamps. “I was really hungry, and my brain cells were barely functioning,” she said. “I was trying to get food and I’d fill out the paperwork and I was trying...

By Isabella Bloom, The Sacramento Bee, July 28, 2021 California community colleges will get $100 million to help homeless and food insecure students as part of a $47.1 billion higher education spending plan that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Tuesday. The community college money for students in need would help fund meal donation programs, food pantries, CalFresh enrollment and other nutrition assistance programs. It would also help colleges offer on- and off-campus housing resources. “Student...