Youth with juvenile justice contact are a unique population that require deliberate and collaborative reintegration into the school setting to reduce their likelihood of a re-offense and to help promote their academic success. Roughly 55% of youth who engage in delinquent behavior re-offend within twelve months (Mathur & Clark, 2014). This post will offer information on strategies for supporting school reintegration.
As quantitative psychologists who study education, teachers and parents often ask us, “What went wrong with all these tests, and how can we fix them?”
At best, educational assessments—from large-scale standardized exams administered over an entire state, to targeted cognitive diagnostic tests used by psychologists in schools—are considered a necessary evil by the teachers, parents, and students who are subjected to them.
“Describe the tongue of a woodpecker,” wrote Leonardo Da Vinci on one of his to-do lists, next to sketching cadavers, designing elaborate machines, and stitching costumes. Da Vinci filled over 7,000 notebook pages with questions, doodles, observations, sketches, and calculations. He nurtured creativity as a habit and skill every day—and it paid off. Da Vinci’s work reshaped multiple disciplines, from science, to art, to engineering.
There is a growing body of research which suggests that blogging can enhance education through reflective practice and can help you to look at your own experiences to improve the way you work. In addition, the emerging field of blog psychology tells us that blogging brings a host of mental health benefits, and it offers us opportunities to expand our knowledge.
Interest in Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, the psychology of the workplace, has gained a lot of traction in recent years. Unfortunately, even with increasing interest many Intro to Psychology students, especially non-psychology majors, rarely get exposed to this dynamic field. Why is this exposure important? First and foremost it broadens a student’s knowledge and understanding of psychology’s application in various contexts. This was the main reason I was drawn to I-O as an undergraduate. I attended a predominately business-oriented college and initially planned to major in economics and finance. That changed when I was introduced to I-O — the perfect marriage of my desire to major in business and my new-found interest in psychology. Secondly, understanding I-O can be extremely beneficial in navigating the world of work, an important skill for students who are starting their careers.
Sometimes, keeping students engaged in the classroom feels like an uphill battle. Teachers work long hours, are held to high standards for content delivery, and have a voluminous amount of preparation and grading to complete every day. We all know that experiential activities and inquiry-based strategies are related to student engagement. We are also fully aware that creating classroom environments that employ these approaches take a lot of time. Therefore, in spite of the research, “lecture continues to be the predominant mode of instruction.” [1]
The Odyssey School is a unique, co-educational independent day school in Stevenson, Maryland that meets the specialized needs of high functioning dyslexic children as well as children with other related language learning differences who are five years through 8th grade age. The School utilizes evidence-based methodologies to prepare our students for success at challenging mainstream secondary schools. The program provides a 3:1 student to teacher ratio and focuses on specialized instruction, character education, and opportunities for students to explore and develop their passions, interests, self-awareness and self-advocacy skills.
In a recent article, Stephen Chew and William Cerbin claim, “Teaching and Learning are lost in a buzzword wasteland.” Teachers struggle to figure out what works and what doesn’t, some quickly adopt any new strategy while others are stuck on worn out ideas that long ago ceased to work. Our students don’t recognize the buzzwords, but they’ve been subjected to numerous educational innovations in various classrooms leaving them with no uniform understanding of how their learning actually works. We certainly don’t know everything, but we can start by making sure that all teachers and students understand the basic processes behind encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories.
In the December 2017/January 2018 edition of Educational Leadership, Sandy Merz highlighted the mental health training gap educators face. Sandy’s key argument is that “To support students, today’s teachers need better training in mental health issues”. I couldn’t agree more with this statement! With the high percentages of students struggling with a mental health issues, educators will sooner or later be faced with a student in distress and the ripple effect it can have in the classroom.
The National Academic Advising Association’s guiding principle is “Advising is teaching” (Appleby, 2006, p. 85). Academic advising enables students to identify, clarify, investigate, prepare for, and accomplish educational, career, and personal goals by providing them with opportunities to identify resources, understand options, and enhance self-awareness. Academic advice can be delivered in many ways (Gordon, Habley, Grites, & Associates 2008), including in-person (one-on-one or in groups and classes), online (websites, podcasts, or instructional platforms), or in print (books, handouts, or brochures). The purpose of this article is to describe a recent addition to this set of advising delivery methods—the Academic Advising Poster (AAP)—and to offer readers a set of online AAPs from the authors.