McGuire, Stevahn, and Bronsther (2019) focused on civic education in elementary grades, an important but sorely missing topic in schools. Using Storypath, a simulation-like approach to address the housing affordability in Seattle, the authors showed how motivated and engaged students were with the topic. A major strength of the study is the…

Darwich (2020) asked "What Kind of Citizens Do Educators Hope Their Students Become?" in her response to "Storypath: A Powerful Tool for Engaging Children in Civic Education" (McGuire et al., 2019). She argued that civics should be rooted in social justice grounded by critical civic empathy, which requires focusing on power and…

Does the current drive to incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) into the K-12 curriculum represent a positive reform that will lead schools to educate the "whole student" and ultimately boost young people's academic success? Or is it a distracting fad that comes with high opportunity costs? Common sense and considerable…

What do K-12 schools need to do to prepare their students for adult success? This was the question that originally catalyzed the standards-and-accountability movement some 30 years ago, though it seems somehow to have gotten lost. Today the question merits revisiting, because addressing it makes a strong case for taking an integrated approach to…

In this essay, Susan Engel argues that curiosity is both intrinsic to children's development and unfolds through social interactions. Thus, it should be cultivated in schools, even though it is often almost completely absent from classrooms. Calling on well-established research and more recent studies, Engel argues that interactions between…

This commentary focuses on the promises and challenges facing the Social and Character Development (SACD) consortium in evaluating the effectiveness of seven universal SACD programs designed to enhance student behavior and school climate under conditions of real world practice. In this commentary, we highlight that the opportunity costs associated…

In this paper, the authors highlight features of the social and cultural context which surrounds services to children. Emphasis is given to the point that those who work with children exist within the same cultural landscape occupied by the children, parents and other parents. Whilst this landscape is diverse, it contains certain dominant,…

It is the position of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) that all elementary school children should be provided with at least one daily period of recess of at least 20 minutes in length. Various cited organizations support school recess as an integral component of a child's physical, social, and academic development,…