ELL News Headlines

School librarian IdaMae Craddock and school counselor Ouida Powe discuss the power of their partnership and the bibliotherapy initiative they launched at Community Lab, a 6–12 public school in Charlottesville, VA. Craddock says, "There is much we librarians can do to partner with school counselors and promote student well-being through bibliotherapy. The counselor-librarian connection can and should be commonplace in schools."

Dual-enrollment programs help nearly 1.4 million high school students take college courses each year. But as dual enrollment grows across the country, access to the option is not distributed equally, according to a new report produced by nearly two dozen higher ed researchers and experts, with funding from the Joyce Foundation.

When Illinois high schoolers go back to school this month, they'll have new coursework that lawmakers and Stanford researchers hope will prepare students to better detect misinformation and search for ulterior motives before trusting online news, social media and information sources.

While the pandemic caused widespread disruption to learning, one of the biggest concerns, for students of all ages, has been how it has affected their mental health. High numbers of teenagers have reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, and the Biden Administration has tried to make student mental health a priority.

Since the return to in-person learning, teachers have struggled to deal with students who lack social skills and the ability to regulate their emotions. This is especially true in early childhood classrooms. A lack of exposure to peers during critical learning months and years has put many early childhood teachers in the situation of having to teach social and emotional skills before they can teach academics. A buddy program—pairing upper elementary or middle school students with students in pre-K through first grade—is a way for teachers to accelerate learning crucial social and emotional skills.

The San Dieguito Union High School District announced plans to hire three bilingual community liaisons in the coming school year after creating the position to better support English-language learners and their families.

Violet T. Adams is a 28-year veteran public school educator in Georgia, where she has taught in traditional and alternative schools in grades 6-12. She now teaches in a rural public high school in Gwinnett County.

One way for teachers to facilitate a classroom social and emotional learning (SEL) discussion about beginning-of-school worries is to embed the conversation into a scheduled classroom read-aloud time.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientists have now performed brain-imaging studies of speakers of 45 different languages. The results show that the speakers’ language networks appear to be essentially the same as those of native English speakers.

In this post, award-winning author Erin Entrada Kelly reflects on her childhood. "I was doubtful when my editor suggested I pull from my personal emotional experience to write my own early middle grade collection, with seven-year-old Marisol Rainey — a half-Filipino, half-white girl in pigtails growing up in south Louisiana — as its centerpiece. No one wants to read about a girl who’s afraid of everything, I mused. That’s not interesting. But then I thought about that little girl, little Erin, who wouldn’t even climb a tree, and I thought of all the other kids out there just like her, who think they aren’t brave or interesting. And I realized something: They deserve stories, too. The quietest personality in the room is just as interesting as the loudest."