What better way to spend the preholiday hours than checking out some of the new resources in the Whole Child Resource Clearinghouse on school-family connections? The very latest includes:
Family Engagement in Education: Seven Principles for Success, from the National Resource Center on Charter School Finance and Governance, is based on research and feedback from charter school leaders and highlights ways in which charter schools have opportunities to involve families.
Working Together: School-Family-Community Partnerships, from the Center for the Education and Study of Diverse Populations at New Mexico Highlands University, is a tool designed to provide educators and families with information, resources, and strategies to both increase and strengthen parent, family, and community involvement. Also available in Spanish.
In a post earlier this month, I described how Healthy People, an initiative that develops national objectives to improve the health of all Americans, opened its proposed 2020 objectives for public comment through December 31, 2009. The health objectives are updated every 10 years and are intended to address a broad range of health needs, encourage collaboration across sectors, help individuals make informed health decisions, and measure prevention efforts.
ASCD recently submitted comments in support of objectives that align with our goal of providing children with healthy learning environments that enhance their academic, physical, and emotional well-being. Each of our comments highlights the inextricable connection between health and learning. Taken together, they underscore the need for a coordinated, whole child approach to health promotion and school improvement.
We commented on everything from the importance of increasing rates of high school completion to the urgent need for adolescents to have close relationships with caring adults. You can access all of ASCD's comments by searching for "ASCD," or you can review all submitted comments by objective.
There's still time to submit your own comments! Together, let's ensure the Healthy People 2020 objectives are relevant to public health needs and help prepare our young people for healthy and fulfilling lives.
Please let us know what you think of ASCD's comments and what objectives you've commented on.
What should schools do to promote a healthy environment for students—one that can optimize their learning? Having a healthy school involves developing policies and programs that not only encourage a healthy mind and body, but also establish safe hallways and classrooms so that students can flourish as individuals in an authentic, mutually supportive community.
ASCD Express highlights practical steps teachers, principals, and school communities can take to ensure that students understand, practice, and benefit from a healthy lifestyle. Learn more.
As part of the ASCD Healthy School Communities network, Barclay Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, Md., uses ASCD's Healthy School Report Card as a way to build school leadership and a wide base of support for analyzing and improving a healthy school environment, which especially includes nutrition and exercise for students.
For example, one Barclay School initiative integrated with the curriculum has students practicing healthy nutrition by growing their own vegetables in portable containers and in raised garden beds on the school grounds. By preparing and eating the food they grow, students have been motivated to eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, while learning about the value of these foods in a well-rounded diet.
Leigh Dalton, community school director for Barclay, notes that the Healthy School Report Card program brings together school stakeholders, including administrators, teachers, students, and community groups, to learn what existing programs already contribute to a healthy school environment and what more they can do.
One Barclay parent points out that because the school recognizes the connections between health and learning, it offers more recess and opportunities for physical activity and exercise than many schools, which have been trimming recess to increase seat time in class. In other health areas, Barclay also plans to extend its school health service by adding dental screening to its existing vision screening program and care of students with asthma and diabetes.
Isn't it amazing that the technology we're using today could be totally outdated a year from now? Technology is progressing at an amazingly rapid rate, and it's hard for most of us to keep up. Few of us can argue with the importance of developing students' knowledge of and facility with technology to prepare them for the demands of the future, so how can we keep up?
Maybe we don't have to.
Not only will the material we teach students today probably be obsolete in the near future, but we also can't predict the technologies they will use tomorrow. What we can teach them is how to navigate the unknown, find ways to integrate technology, and give them opportunities to become lifelong explorers. In the meantime, educators may benefit from the ideas and expertise of students.
How are you creating opportunities for students to integrate technology into teaching and learning? What challenges do you face in helping students take on the role of contributor in addition to learner?
More kids are drinking too many sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), and the impact on health isn't good. Not news, for sure, but the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has just issued a concise research synthesis detailing the grim story and offering some ideas for next steps in addressing the problem.
"The Negative Impact of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages on Children's Health" tells the story of steadily rising SSB consumption by children and adolescents over the last 30 years—consistent across age, gender, and socioeconomic status. More kids are drinking ever-larger quantities of SSBs more often, from teenagers guzzling soda to toddlers downing sugary fruit drinks. This, in turn, is contributing to obesity and reducing intake of key nutrients by replacing more healthful beverages. Caffeine intake also brings a host of problems, such as anxiety and poor sleep.
What's the solution? The paper urges research focusing on "evaluating broadly applicable interventions and policy approaches to reducing SSB consumption among children and adolescents. Increased attention also should be paid to shifting norms and preferences related to SSBs and other beverages among children, adolescents, and parents."
We've seen recent efforts to reduce availability of sugary beverages in schools and even moves by companies like Coke to make calorie labeling more prominent, but it remains to be seen if any of these efforts will be effective in bending the troubling curve.
What do you think will be most effective in creating a healthier, happier medium when it comes to kids and sugary drinks?
Educators are familiar with the ongoing battles over vending machines that offer soda and other unhealthy snacks to students. But chocolate milk is at the center of the latest food fight.
NPR reports that schools across the country have eliminated chocolate milk from their lunchroom offerings because of its high sugar content. The dairy industry is fighting back with its "Raise Your Hand for Chocolate Milk Campaign," which contends that kids drink less milk—and miss out on its nutritional benefits—when chocolate milk is removed as an option.
The NPR story quotes renegade lunch lady Ann Cooper, director of Nutrition Services for Boulder's public schools, who removed chocolate milk from her district's lunchrooms a few years ago. "Chocolate milk is soda in drag, as far as I'm concerned," she says. "In many chocolate milks, there's 3.1 grams of sugar per ounce. Soda is 3.3. It's so close."
Ann Marie Krautheim, senior vice president of Nutrition Affairs for the National Dairy Council, counters that the amount of sugar in chocolate milk is an acceptable trade-off for the essential nutrients milk provides.
Which side of this food fight are you on?
You can read more about school food offerings and other health education topics in Health & Learning, ASCD's December/January issue of Educational Leadership.
Speak Up, a national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow®, gives individuals the opportunity to share their viewpoints about key educational issues. Each year, findings are summarized and shared with national and state policymakers. Participating schools and districts can access their data online, free of charge. The following Whole Child Partners support the effort:
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of School Librarians
Council for Exceptional Children
International Society for Technology in Education
National Association of Elementary School Principals
National Education Association
National Middle School Association
Public Education Network
Take the survey! The survey is open until December 23, 2009, and currently more than 245,000 students, teachers, administrators, and parents have spoken up about how to improve their schools.
Academic language, as described by ASCD authors Pérsida and William Himmele, is "the language of books." Acquiring academic language means learning content-specific as well as non–content-specific vocabulary and navigating the grammatical patterns of informational texts.
Classroom teachers bear the most responsibility for conveying academic content, so they need ways to actively engage English language learners (ELLs) in lessons that help them simultaneously develop language and comprehend content.
ASCD Express explores how to embed academic language in any conversation, how language objectives strengthen lesson objectives, how to help ELLs understand figurative language, and how to use graphic organizers to scaffold content-specific vocabulary. Learn more.
Extend your knowledge on how to meet the needs of ELLs with guests well-versed in the academic, social, and policy issues of these students on the Whole Child Podcast. Download the podcast and access archived episodes.
Be sure to visit the Whole Child Resource Clearinghouse frequently for links to helpful Web content on all aspects of the whole child. Some new items related to healthy schools include
Research Review: School-Based Health Interventions and Academic Achievement from the Washington State Board of Health provides important new evidence that links student health and academic performance. It identifies proven health interventions and practical resources that can positively affect both student health and academic achievement.
2009 Health and Wellness Best Practices Guide for Colorado School Districts is an online guide designed for administrators, school board members, parents, and community members that highlights school-district level best practices for healthy schools, students, and staff. A shorter version of this guide is available for download in English and Spanish.
Raising student achievement is the mantra of the NCLB era. Schools and governments invest substantial dollars in instructional approaches to raise achievement but pay little attention to sleep deprivation among students. We were in a 3rd grade classroom where two children were sound asleep with their heads on their desks before the morning announcements were over. Even with a near-perfect teacher and curriculum, they weren't learning much that morning.
Research, as well as common sense, shows that sleep is essential for learning and good behavior. Sleepy students have a hard time paying attention, remembering, and controlling impulses. They feel irritable and depressed. Sleep deprivation is remarkably widespread among America's children, particularly those most at risk for school failure.
Parents are responsible for getting students to bed on time. However, they may lack the skills or not be willing to pull the plug on the TV, Facebook, or other enticing activities that keep children up late. Schools can make parents' job harder in their attempts to provide rich learning and extracurricular experiences. Sometimes teachers assign so much homework that children are up late trying to complete it. School athletic teams compete until 9:00 p.m. or later on weeknights and don't get home from away games until much later. Play practices go until midnight or later. Yearbook editing may occur late at night. Schools can reverse these trends. If even a small increase in sleep, of say 30 minutes per night, can raise children's achievement level at no cost, shouldn't this be a priority?
Are sleepy students common at your school? How's your school responding?
