Blog

During Hispanic Heritage Month, we are spotlighting some of our team members from our Latinx Employee Resource Group. Derek Niño, a Senior Consultant at Education First, shares some reflections in honor of HHM and his experiences. Can you talk about your Hispanic heritage? How do you celebrate this month? My dad is from Uriangato, Guanajuato, Mexico, and my mom identifies...
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How one CEO combined strategic planning and organizational development for a powerful, sustaining organization A Q&A with Eddie Lincoln, CEO of Equal Opportunity Schools In 2021, Education First partnered with Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) to refine the organization’s strategic priorities and learning agenda to set the stage for continued innovation, growth and learning for the next three years. When we...
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As we reach the halfway point of summer, leaders are gradually returning to their schools and offices where they will quickly have to find a solution to one of their most pressing issues ahead of the new school year: filling the remaining teacher vacancies that exist across their schools. This is not a new phenomenon; schools and districts across the...
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[Wellbeing is] feeling a connection like you’re connected to your school, where you’re at, where you’re working. Some type of way that you understand that whatever reason you got into teaching for, you’re able to accomplish that. Teacher, (Ed First interviews 2022) In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and districts nationwide are scrambling to fill classrooms in the...
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Never before has the need for social and emotional learning been so great in our students’ classrooms. The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented event that had a profound impact on all aspects of our society, particularly on the social and emotional wellbeing of both students and adults. Recent surveys indicate that 70 percent of public schools reported an increase in...
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Current systems of summative assessment have not served the needs of all students, families and teachers. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, school systems across the country face new assessment challenges. One promising innovation is through-year assessments. The idea is this: instead of one single, high-stakes summative assessment at the end of the year, through-year assessment systems aim to accomplish three...
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We know that teachers are grappling with unfinished learning and learning loss among their students from the past few school years. We also know that high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) are a critical component of strong, standards-aligned instruction and can support in recovering student learning. But in order to effectively understand and utilize high-quality instructional materials, teachers have to have the...
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How important are standard assessments? It depends on who you ask. Teachers generally agree that testing is important—but also that traditional bubble-sheet exams can feel more like an interruption than a key component of inquiry-based teaching and learning. Families want to know that students are on track for college or career, but also tend to put more stock in classroom...
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“I’m left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told.”—Clint Smith  Do you remember when you were first told about slavery? What about America? I vaguely remember my first explicit lesson about either, but I do remember being in my 10th grade English class and learning about the Harlem Renaissance—a period where Black artists displayed...
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For the 2022–23 school year, we invited applications for the SEL in Action Awards from two applicant pools: School-based educators (including teachers, counselors, administrators and other school staff) seeking to implement SEL initiatives in classrooms or schools in the 2022–2023 school year, and District-level applicants seeking to implement SEL initiatives district-wide and/or across multiple schools within one district (including a...
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