| |||||||||||||||||||
Philadelphia Inquirer--Meet the students graduating from high school and college at the same time
These Gloucester County students didn’t set out to earn a college degree at the same time as their high school diploma. Not at first, anyway.
They started out taking a few credits -- maybe a high school course that counted for college credit, or an elective college course that wasn’t offered at the high school.
As they racked up the credits, they began to realize how close they were to an extraordinary goal: Graduating from high school and community college at the same time.
Jonathan Lai, Staff Writer| Updated: May 22, 2017 — 5:00 AM EDT
Associated Press (via Press of Atlantic City)--New Jersey School Boards Association elects new president
WEST WINDSOR, N.J. (AP) — The New Jersey School Boards Association has a new leader.
Daniel Sinclair was elected to a two-year term as the association's president during its semi-annual meeting held Saturday at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor. He is Lakeland Regional Board of Education member and previously served on the Wanaque Board of Education, including six years as its president.
The Wanaque resident succeeds Donald Webster Jr., of Manchester Township, who now becomes immediate past president.
Associated Press|May 20, 2017
NY Times--It Was Hard This Year to Keep Politics Out of High School Yearbooks
A high school yearbook is a keepsake. Like an Instagram filter, it’s meant to bathe recent memories in the warm, soft-focus glow of nostalgia. As an object, it evokes affection and community; you hope to show it to your children and grandchildren someday. A yearbook isn’t supposed to be divisive.
So how to commemorate a school year that coincided with a meltdown in decorum in American politics?
That was the question high school yearbook editors and their advisers had to ask themselves while they were busy gathering up mug shots of the seniors, quotes, and group photographs of the football team, the cheerleading squad and the chess club.
The challenge of how to capture this raucous political moment was especially pressing in America’s purple places, like the Kansas City region, where Trump supporters and women’s marchers live and learn in proximity.
By DANA GOLDSTEINMAY 21, 2017
NY Times--Bringing the Dream of an Elite College to Rural Students
SAMPSON COUNTY, N.C. — The first time Nyreke Peters met the new college adviser at his rural high school, he was skeptical. Other adults at Hobbton High School spoke with the same Southern accent and shared an easygoing familiarity that came from having gone to the same schools and having spent their lives in the same county.
The adviser, Emily Hadley, was a determined recent college graduate from New Hampshire who seemed bizarrely interested in his future and pressed him to think beyond the confines of the sweet potato and hog farms.
Mr. Peters, a senior, had his sights set on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but she persuaded him to apply to Middlebury College, an elite institution in Vermont that he had never heard of.
A few months later, to his astonishment, he was admitted. A scholarship fund from Sampson County, a little more than an hour’s drive south of Raleigh, N.C., paid for him to visit, and he decided to attend.
ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS| MAY 21, 2017
Education Week--Children Must Be Taught to Collaborate, Studies Say
Researchers explore group work in class
At its best, collaboration in the classroom can help students think more deeply and creatively about a subject and develop more empathy for others' perspectives. At its worst, group tasks can deteriorate into awkward silences, arguments—or frustration for the one child who ends up doing everyone else's work.
Now, as the teaching technique gains new prominence in state standards, researchers and educators are working to understand how to help students gain the skills needed to learn and work in groups.
"Learning through doing is an important component in this, … but by itself, it's not enough," said Emily Lai, the director of formative assessment and feedback for Pearson, the educational publishing company. "Students go into these experiences with very little understanding of what they should be working toward—and so students walk away from these experiences a little jaded. Collaboration is just like any other skill; it has to be taught."
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/05/17/children-must-be-taught-to-collaborate-studies.html
Sarah D. Sparks| May 16, 2017
