Tools Being Talked About

Teachers know that meeting students’ individual needs in a bustling classroom is a Sisyphean task. But the job may be getting easier, thanks to a variety of new digital literacy tools. Last year Debra Rook began using Newsela, a program that uses news articles about current events to build reading comprehension, and customizes each article for five different reading levels.

Here’s what we know: Implementing a comprehensive, standards-aligned curriculum is a complex undertaking, even in a typical, in-person classroom. There are new pedagogical approaches to consider, texts and topics to unpack, instructional shifts to practice, academic routines to introduce, and the list goes on.

The old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know” can be problematic when it comes to understanding how high schoolers are doing after graduation. For school leaders, a lack of data makes it hard to craft goals and metrics around high school graduates’ postsecondary paths.