Engagement is a lever for achievement — when students are highly engaged, they are more likely to learn and persevere through challenges. How can educators effectively measure and assess student engagement in the classroom? We're joined by Nona Ullman and Melissa Payette of LessonLoop — an organization that guides better instruction and transforms learner engagement — to talk about the innovative practice of using student feedback to measure engagement and increase joyful learning.

Station teaching can transform traditional classrooms into dynamic learning environments — the key is to familiarize yourself with the promising practices and potential pitfalls of this approach. In this episode, we're talking with co-teaching specialists Dr. Laura Rigolosi and Jacqui Stolzer about how educators can make station teaching work in their classrooms.

Adopting and adapting a new curriculum is a complex and multi-faceted process. It can pose a significant challenge as it involves navigating various competing needs, such as state standards, standardized exams, district and school-specific goals, and the diverse needs of students. The question arises: which of these priorities takes precedence? How do you do it all? Today we are Courtney Brown, Senior PD Advisor, NTN@TC Initiative Leader, and Secondary Ed. Specialist and, someone who has worked closely with a variety of schools to support curriculum, and ELA and ENL specialist, Lauren Midgette, who has been involved in various curricular projects with CPET.

Establishing and forging meaningful relationships with students at the start of the school year can be challenging — students often have diverse backgrounds, needs, and personalities, and they need to feel a sense of trust in order to be vulnerable about their learning needs, their personal opinions, and their challenges. In this episode, we’re talking with Kelsey Hammond, a former ELA teacher and Lead Professional Development Coach, and Victoria Fernandez, a former Math/Special Education teacher and Lead Professional Development Coach about the importance of building relationships that foster a positive learning environment.

Happy New Year! It’s September, and we're celebrating the start of a new school year — a time for reflecting, goal setting, and anticipating our new students. With the return to school, we teachers often return to the advice and wisdom passed down to us about how best to start the school year: "Don’t smile until Christmas." "Never let them see you sweat!" "Fake it ‘til you make it." Sometimes these words of advice feel mythic, especially to newer teachers. But, this so-called wisdom, for the most part, comes from a time when the culture valued a teacher-centered and dominant force in the classroom. Today, we're talking with our team about all things back-to-school, including debunking some of these teaching myths about how teachers should begin the year now that we are in the 21st century.

Project-based learning can be an overwhelming approach to teaching and curriculum design, and transforming practice requires time, which is one of the most difficult resources for teachers to come by. In this spotlight episode, we're talking with Dr. Cristina Compton, about one of her signature courses, The Power of Project-Based Learning, and how she offers effective and practical strategies for bringing this work into your classroom.

Since its release, ChatGPT has provoked discussion within the arena of the classroom and beyond. ChatGPT is a revolutionary AI language model in many respects, capable of advanced and human-sounding prose. As a result, many teachers and administrators expressed concern when the AI-bot was first released, with many schools banning access to ChatGPT on their school or district internet. Today we are talking to Dr. Cristina Compton, an elementary education and project-based learning specialist at CPET; Chelsey Barber, a current PhD student at Teachers College whose research interests include the effects of 21st technology on learning & teaching; and Kelsey Hammond, a professional development and literacy coach at CPET, about all things ChatGPT.

Our classrooms are made up of students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In some cases, our students are learning a new language in addition to discipline-specific content. Multi-language learners require intentional support to improve their fluency both reading and writing. What do those strategies look like in teachers’ planning and instruction, especially when teachers do not speak their students’ home language? We are talking to Marcia Garcia Underwood, founder and CEO of M Ideas Consulting Services, and Lauren Midgette, a professional development coach at CPET. Both of our guests today will be sharing their most effective strategies to support multi-language learners based on their years of classroom and coaching experience.

In a time when students are inundated with media and technology all around them, it can be difficult for teachers to engage students in reading a book that takes place almost 80 years ago. Teachers are often looking for the best approaches to spark students’ interest and their understanding of the importance of storytelling about world events and the human experience. In this episode, we’re talking with our colleague Courtney Brown and Mike Epperson, an ELA teacher at AECI-2 charter school in the Bronx, about the innovative annotation strategy he's been using to help students connect to texts in his 10th grade classroom.

As school districts respond to the concerns about a literacy crisis in the U.S., many are rolling out big initiatives to increase reading performance. This often comes with big changes to curriculum, expectations for educators, and a lot of pressure to implement concepts they may not understand. In this episode, we’re continuing our conversation about the Science of Reading with Dr. Cristina Compton and Kelsey Hammond as we explore the implications of new policies being enacted across New York City public schools. Listen to Part 1 of our conversation here: https://soundcloud.com/user-556918646/the-science-of-reading

Books have the power to introduce us to new places, cultures, and perspectives. But right now students across the country are facing empty bookshelves in their classrooms and school libraries, as books that fairly address issues of race, gender, and culture in age-appropriate ways are at risk of being banned from classroom and library shelves by state or local officials. This week, we're joined by Dr. Heather Harding, Executive Director of Campaign for a Shared Future (https://www.campaignsharedfuture.org/), to discuss what we can do in our local communities to ensure that all children have the opportunity to access inclusive content.

Let’s be real: teacher appreciation week should be EVERY week. In this special episode, we want to honor and to celebrate the challenging work that teachers do every day to educate and to inspire their students. We’ve brought our CPET colleagues together to share stories about the teachers who have had a profound impact on us as individuals.

What is the best way to teach children to read? This question has plagued teachers, administrators, and literacy specialists for decades in the K-12 space. This question is often a highly controversial one, as literacy issues can become caught up in politics — both within the field of education and depending which expert or company or program one is aligned with. This week, we're talking to Dr. Cristina Compton, a former elementary school educator and the Director of Program Development at the Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), and Kelsey Hammond, a former middle school English Language Arts’ educator and professional development coach, about the science of reading.

As teachers juggling many expectations, we may struggle to know whether our students are understanding what they are reading — unlike writing, reading comprehension is an entirely internal process. We may also struggle to keep up with the research surrounding best practices for improving our students’ reading comprehension. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Judy Willis, author of Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. Blending her experience as a board-certified practicing neurologist and a classroom teacher, Dr. Willis applies neuroscience research to successful teaching strategies, helping teachers bridge theory and practice.

Because the classroom space encompasses so many routines and expectations, it can be daunting to begin conversations around implementing and sustaining positive change. Making a change — whether it's required or voluntary — can be difficult for both teachers and students. We can often become creatures of habit, comfortable with the status quo, even when we're aware that our habits could be improved. Today, we are talking to Jen David-Lang from The Main Idea about the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear, which examines tiny changes we can make to remarkably improve our habits and routines in the classroom and beyond.

Designing projects for an individual class can be a daunting experience, but what about for a whole district, and in the wake of the pandemic? At the height of exhaustion, many school and leaders within the Scarsdale Public Schools district were looking for ways to reignite a passion for learning in students and teachers. But how could teachers collaborate across disciplines, across grade levels, and across schools to develop curriculum that re-engaged their students? Three school and district leaders from Scarsdale join us in this episode to examine their project-based learning district initiative — SPARK — and its impact on students and their larger community.

Writing projects can feel like a distraction, unless we look at the ways in which projects increase learning for students, and the ways in which we can integrate them into our calendars without losing teaching time for skills or content that we need to cover. This week, we're joined by participants from all levels of our signature writing projects — Meg Davis, one of our K-12 coaches; Vicky Beswick, an NYC DOE teacher; and Juan Filan & Deylin Pena-Rodriguez — two 9th grade students who established their voices as student authors throughout the writing process.

Connecting real-world scenarios to classroom content creates wonderful learning opportunities for students — but it also requires that teachers make many decisions about how to organize, sequence, and assess their instruction. Dr. Adele Bruni Ashley and Dr. Cristina Compton — both of whom lead CPET's project-based learning initiatives — talk with us this week about what sets project-based learning apart from traditional assessments, and how to build relevant instruction for students.

How can you locate effective teaching tools without spending hours combing through the internet? With website after website of education resources, it can be hard to tell which have been vetted and will be most useful for your practice. This week, we're chatting with two members of our coaching team — Dr. Cristina Compton and Lauren Midgette — about the resources they're currently using, and how they navigate the world of online teaching tools without becoming overwhelmed. ---------- Resources discussed in this episode: Making the Case for Project-Based Learning (https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/making-the-case-for-project-based-learning) The Believing Game: Fostering Empathy in the Classroom (https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/the-believing-game-fostering-empathy-in-the-classroom) Engagement is Everything: Three Pillars of Student Engagement (https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/engagement-is-everything-three-pillars-of-student-engagement) What Makes a Rigorous Question? (https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/what-makes-a-rigorous-question)

Coaching for equity is personal, and more complex than simply providing new information about a teaching strategy or protocol. At CPET, we ground this important work in four entry points that allow for educators to create a cultural shift within a community toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. Dr. Sherrish Holloman joins us this week to discuss the focus and potential challenges of each entry point, approaches to culturally relevant professional learning, and the recommendations that emerge as we coach toward change.