Why Kindergarten Is The New First Grade
"What are some of the things that the monsters like to eat in this story?" teacher Marisa McGee asks a trio of girls sitting at her table.McGee teaches kindergarten at Walker Jones Elementary in...
View ArticleBe In The Know About Education — With NPR Ed's Newsletter
By some accounts, education is a $7 trillion global industry ripe for disruption. Others see it as a sacred pursuit, nurturing developing minds while preserving tradition. Around the world, education...
View ArticleHow Parents And Teachers Can Nurture The 'Quiet Power' Of Introverts
When Susan Cain wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking in 2012, it was a big success. The book made the cover of Time magazine, spent weeks on the New York Times...
View ArticleHow Adults Can Encourage Kids To Be Original Thinkers
When I first read Originals I couldn't help but take notes. What I jotted down was essentially a to-do list for how I could be more creative, how I could think up and then communicate new ideas.But the...
View ArticleFor Adults, Lifelong Learning Happens The Old Fashioned Way
On any given weekend, the Washington, D.C., public library system offers nearly a dozen classes. You can try Matt McEntee's class, where he'll teach you how to fix anything from a clock to a broken...
View ArticleTwo Days Inside A Classroom For Young Offenders
Set back from the main road, surrounded by trees along the Winooski River, is Vermont's only facility for youths in trouble. The building hardly looks like a jail, but young people come here from all...
View ArticleYou Can't Learn What You Can't See: Here's How Your State Screens For Vision...
It's one of the most basic things in education: seeing the board. Research has shown, over and over again, that if you can't see, you're going to have an awfully hard time in school. And yet too often...
View ArticleBehind The Scenes: How A Fourth-Grade Class Reported Our Story
So we're about halfway through our 50 Great Teachers project, and we've been looking for ways of shaking it up. We've done photo essays, web comics and videos.These endeavors brought us to our latest...
View Article5 Pieces Of Wisdom For Kindergarten Teachers
When you enter Marissa McGee's classroom, the first thing you notice is her connection with her students. They're delighted by her enthusiasm, they pick up on her sarcasm, and they often double over...
View ArticleWhat Young Men Of Color Can Teach Us About The Achievement Gap
Public schools in the U.S. now have a majority of nonwhite students.That's been the case since 2014, and yet children of color — especially boys — still lag behind their white peers.This story has been...
View ArticleCue The Political Commentary: Grad Speeches In An Election Year
The commencement speech season is underway and grads are soaking up advice and wisdom all over the country.And since it's an election year, it's hard for speakers to resist stepping onto the...
View ArticleWhat One District's Data Mining Did For Chronic Absence
Mel Atkins has spent most of his life with Grand Rapids Public Schools in Michigan. He graduated from Ottawa Hills High, where he played baseball. But his real love was bowling. He says he's bowled 22...
View ArticleMore Than 6 Million U.S. Students Are 'Chronically Absent'
It's one of the oldest issues in school improvement: Getting kids to show up. If students miss 10 percent of the school year — that's just two days a month --research shows they are way more likely to...
View ArticleIt Doesn't Pay To Be An Early-Childhood Teacher
Why would she teach preschool when she could make a heck of a lot more money teaching kindergarten? It's a question I've heard over and over again reporting on education. In some places, we pay early...
View ArticleHow Teachers Can Help 'Quiet Kids' Tap Their Superpowers
When Lily Shum was little, she dreaded speaking up in class. It wasn't because she didn't have anything interesting to say, or because she wasn't paying attention or didn't know the answer. She was...
View ArticleWhat College Freshmen Are Reading
I can remember the weeks before starting school at Skidmore College, furiously trying to finish Gregory Howard Williams' memoir, Life on the Color Line. The book had been assigned as our freshman...
View Article#NPRreads: Take A Leisurely Trip Through These Four Stories This Weekend
#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and in The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the...
View ArticleA New School Year Brings Renewed Focus On Attendance
Like many schools, Gibson Elementary in St. Louis had big problems with attendance — many students were missing nearly a month of school a year.So Melody Gunn, who was the principal at Gibson last...
View ArticleBig Wings, Bigger Dreams: A Sleepover In The Space Shuttle's Shadow
Visiting a museum full of airplanes and rocket ships is a pretty awesome field trip. Now imagine camping out for a whole night in Smithsonian's huge hangar outside Washington D.C. You're there with a...
View ArticleTrace The Remarkable History Of The Humble Pencil
A class of fifth-graders from Green Acres Elementary in Lebanon, Ore., asked us to find out how pencil lead is made. That quest took us all the way back to the dawn of the universe and then all the way...
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