Teachers shaken by recent events and wondering how to work for change in our society and schools can start with these lesson plans, videos, and other resources.

Recent events have shaken me to my core, and the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd suggest that people across the country are similarly shaken.

Want to increase a young child’s motivation to read? Tap into their natural curiosity, a new study finds.

“What are antennae used for, Daddy?”

We’re sitting cosily on the couch reading a picture book, and my 5-year-old son is quick to spot animal features that he doesn’t understand—a giraffe’s neck, a turtle’s shell. And ants’ antennae. I mimic antennae on my head with my fingers—a natural, almost instinctive gesture—and explain to him that they’re sometimes called feelers and they help ants touch and smell what’s around them, especially food.

For both English learners and world language students, getting out of the classroom can make learning new words more engaging.

Task-based language teaching, the practice of learning through student-centred meaningful tasks, makes a target language come alive for students both in and outside the classroom. Using audio and visuals in any literacy classroom is important, particularly when working with English language learners, and research from the National Reading Technical Assistance Center shows that students learn target language vocabulary more effectively when they engage with it in a variety of ways.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the 2020–21 school year, but planning for a mix of remote and in-person instruction will help educators be ready.

Covid-19 has made the 2019–20 school year one we will never forget. With no notice or preparation, teachers were forced to pivot to online teaching. They have performed heroically. This isn’t just my assessment—it’s the consensus of the many students who have shared with me their experience learning from home via technology.

These students—and their teachers whom I’ve also interviewed over the last six weeks—are far less sanguine about online learning, however, with real concerns about its quality and effectiveness.

As a graduate student a decade ago, I completed a yearlong project on the impacts of the digital divide in schools. Back then, I was struck by the complexities and nuances of the problem, realizing quickly that the divide wasn’t only about connecting to the internet—as it had been when the term was coined in the mid-1990s—but also about how it’s accessed and used.

With remote learning at the top of educators’ minds during the Covid-19 pandemic, the topic of digital equity is centre stage again, and I’m sad to see that not enough has changed in 10 years. According to a recent report from Common Sense Media, nearly 12 million students don’t have the technology they need to learn from home during the current crisis, and in some states, like Oklahoma and Mississippi, more than a third of students have no access to the internet at all.