Hear Lizzette Reynolds, Vice President of Policy for ExcelinEd, an organization focused on supporting leaders in transforming education to unlock opportunity and lifelong success for every child, as she highlights the significance of educators connecting with each student as a means of mitigating shared trauma from the COVID pandemic.
Learn from Zaretta Hammond, a teacher educator, literacy advocate, and the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, as she spotlights the important role parents play in a child’s education and ways in which parents are well-positioned to teach their children outside of a traditional classroom setting.
Hear from Rob Jagers, vice president of research at the Collaborative For Academic, Social, And Emotional Learning (CASEL) where he leads work with partner districts to explore how social and emotional learning can be leveraged to promote equitable learning environments and equitable developmental outcomes for students from historically underserved groups.
Hear Brigid Ahern, President and CEO of Turnaround for Children, a nonprofit that translates the science of learning and development into tools, practices and systems for educators to help all students thrive, as she breaks down the importance of fostering supportive environments and developmental relationships for children to flourish.
Scott Hartl, President & CEO of EL Education, an organization focused on creating classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations, highlights how learning occurs in many platforms.
With so much uncertainty and so little time to reflect, young people across the country— and the adults who care for them— are asking: how can I make meaning of the COVID crisis? As part of our ongoing curation of COVID resources, the SoLD Alliance interviewed education leaders to learn how the science of learning and development can be used to navigate this pandemic and its implications for young people, their communities and the systems that surround them.
The science of learning and development presents many powerful lessons that can transform education systems, advance equity, and help every young person thrive. These lessons (outlined in the sidebar) should inform decisions about how to navigate the ongoing COVID pandemic, including the budgetary constraints that our education and other youth serving systems will face as a result.
By now it’s become apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a disproportionate, devastating impact on marginalized communities, specifically people of color who face systemic inequities that shape health, economic and educational outcomes. Yet, COVID has shone a bright light on something else, too: the centrality of consistent, caring adult relationships to students’ learning and development.
The science of learning and development presents many powerful lessons that can transform education systems, advance equity, and can help every young person thrive. The SoLD Alliance has previously outlined some of these overlapping, connected findings including potential, malleability, individuality, context, relationships, integration, and continuum. Today, we explore a new finding: meaning-making.
The confluence of events convulsing American society—from the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people, to the deleterious and disproportionate impacts of the COVID pandemic on people of color—are destructive and traumatic forces in the lives of millions of young people, particularly those who are Black.
