Author: Reporter

This article first appeared in The Teaching Professor on May 1, 2023 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Learn more about The Teaching Professor here. “Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”—Donald Redelmeier (Lewis, 2017, p. 236) Have you worked with students for months to create a learning community only to have the final interaction take place in a sterile room where students silently write and then slip out? An experience that is the antithesis of the relationship-rich interactions they encountered in the course? Perhaps you have experienced impersonal completions whereby students submit their final projects on an LMS link or under…

Peyrin Kao, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science lecturer, was suspended from teaching for a semester after UC Berkeley decreed that Kao’s criticism of Israel had violated campus bans on “political advocacy” in class. There are two significant problems with this action: Kao didn’t engage in advocacy in his class, and Berkeley’s rules don’t restrict political advocacy. The suspension of Kao reflects two alarming possibilities: Either Kao is being targeted for his criticism of Israel and there is selective persecution of faculty for leftist political beliefs, or Kao’s suspension shows a new, broader ban on all political speech in…

President Donald Trump didn’t fulfill his pledge to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education in 2025. But he got closer than any other president in the agency’s 46-year-old history, and his dramatic downsizing of the agency and attempts to redirect federal funding cast a shadow of uncertainty over schools and districts. That’s why “dismantle” is Education Week’s 2025 word of the year. Education is largely governed by states, and federal funding makes up about 10 cents for every dollar K-12 schools spend. So shifts in federal bureaucracy seem to pale compared to actions on the state and local level. But…

School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here. The Federal Trade Commission announced this month plans to crack down on technology company Illuminate Education over a massive 2021 data breach. The move added to a long list of government actions against the firm since hackers broke into its systems and made off with the sensitive information of more than 10 million students. Three state attorneys general have also now imposed fines and security mandates on the company following allegations it misled customers about its cybersecurity safeguards and waited nearly two years to notify…

Listen to the article 7 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday challenging the growing ecosystem of state AI laws and setting the stage for a federal policy to oversee the technology, citing concerns over compliance challenges for businesses and stymying innovation.  The executive order tasks U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with creating an AI Litigation Task Force in the next 30 days to challenge state AI laws that “unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce” or clash with existing federal laws. Trump also called for a national policy…

By: Mason Pashia and Bobbi Macdonald The following is the fictional 2030 mayoral Inaugural Address that paved the way for learning ecosystems and our 2040 learning future. Check out more blogs from the future here.  My friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, Tonight, as I stand before you – humbled by your trust, lifted by our shared hopes and dreams – I see more than just a town or a city. I see a living network of possibility, a community ready to grow into something the world has never seen before: a true Learning Ecosystem. For too long, our imaginations have…

With the imminent arrival of early-decision results comes a new round of hand-wringing about the admissions practice, which affords students a better chance of getting accepted to their top institution but requires them to commit if admitted. Critics argue that the practice disadvantages low- and middle-income students, who fear being locked into attending a college before they know if they can afford it—although many colleges with an early-decision option allow students to back out over financial constraints. It also prevents applicants from comparing financial aid offers across multiple institutions. “Because there is so much uncertainty, families with high incomes are…

Schools are dealing with record-high rates of depression and anxiety in students, along with declining academic performance.Recent studies have linked high levels of social media use during adolescence with lower cognitive performance and poorer mental health outcomes.Hundreds of school districts have sued major social media companies, claiming their products are eroding students’ mental health and ability to learn, as well as forcing schools to devote significant resources to managing the academic and behavioral fallout.More schools and districts are also curtailing students’ access to cellphones during the school day—a policy that educators and lawmakers argue will benefit students’ mental health and…

I’ve been teaching long enough to recognize when something fundamental is shifting in the classroom. Lately, that shift sounds like a single word echoing through my courses: why.Why are we doing this? Why does it matter? Why should I care?At first, it can sound like pushback, the kind of challenge that might once have been mistaken for defiance. But I don’t see it that way. When Gen Z students ask “why,” they’re not questioning authority; they’re questioning meaning. They’re trying to understand whether what they’re being asked to learn aligns with a world that already feels crowded with information, competition…

We did­n’t have civ­i­liza­tion until we had cities, and we did­n’t have cities until we had agri­cul­ture. So, at least, goes a wide­ly accept­ed nar­ra­tive in “big his­to­ry” — a nar­ra­tive some­what trou­bled by the dis­cov­ery of ruins on Göbek­li Tepe, or “Pot­bel­ly Hill,” in south­east­ern Turkey. Appar­ent­ly inhab­it­ed from around 9500 to 8000 BC, the ancient set­tle­ment pre­dates the Pyra­mids of Giza by near­ly 8,000 years, and Stone­henge by about 6,000 years. Though it was once believed to be a site used for rit­u­al pur­pos­es only, lat­er research unearthed evi­dence that sug­gests it was host to a vari­ety of…