The Dalton Plan is well known in educational historiography. But there are also unanswered questions such as: how is it possible that a pedagogical experiment begun in the United States in February 1920 had, by the month of March, already come to be known first hand by a visiting English educator? The objective in this article is to find an…

In "Differentiation and the Brain: How Neuroscience Supports the Learner-Friendly Classroom, Second Edition," authors David Sousa and Carol Ann Tomlinson examine the basic principles of differentiation in light of what the current research on educational neuroscience reveals. This research offers information and insights that can help…

This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018. It seems logical that students would be more successful in learning if instruction is tailored, including the environment, pace, and presentation of concepts, to each student's needs, interests, and aspirations. However, personalizing…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often require differentiated strategies to access academic content. Hence, research-based interventions to support STEM (Science, Mathematics, Technology, and Engineering) education for individuals with ASD are necessary to guide implementation. This review serves to (a) summarize studies that…

To create a clear picture of a personalized learning environment, this article walks us through a day at the Waukesha STEM Academy, a Wisconsin charter school serving about 300 students in grades 6-8. The article follows Cal, a student making the transition from his former traditional school (where every week looked about the same) to a school…

Based on the presupposition that visual literacy skills are not usually learned unaided by osmosis, but require targeted learning support, this article explores how everyday encounters with visuals can be leveraged as contingent learning opportunities. The author proposes that a learner's environment can become a visual learning space if…

L. S. Vygotsky's contributions to social research shifted paradigms by constructing now-foundational theories of teaching, learning, language, and their educational interactions. This article contextualizes a nearly forgotten, century-old research corpus, "The Fundamentals of Defectology." Drawing on "Defectology," two…

The purpose of this article is to assist classroom teachers in discerning qualitative differences between a student-written report and student-led research. There are many connotations to the terms "report" and "research," and they can have implications on how teachers effectively or ineffectively differentiate instruction to…

Active learning exercises engage students during lectures, but often fail to take account of the individual learning position of each student. The 'quecture' is a partially flipped lecture that incorporates students posing their own questions (quecture questions), discussing them during lectures and revisiting them later. These interactive…

The challenge to include students with disabilities in Catholic schools requires a comprehensive system of service delivery to meet student need and avoid pathologizing individuals as problems. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), a framework for organizing resources, delivering services,…

A one-size-fits-all model of instruction cannot provide equitable access to education for all students. Research demonstrates that thoughtfully changing instruction to support student learning during a lesson, known as adaptive teaching, is an important component of effective literacy instruction. To understand this dynamic dimension of effective…

Extensive studies have been conducted to diagnose and predict students' academic performance by analyzing a large amount of data related to their learning behaviors in a blended learning environment. But there is a lack of research examining how individualized learning interventions could improve students' academic performance in such a learning…

This paper explores a historical analysis of the comic book character Robin to illuminate how different understandings of youth at different historical points intersect with notions of pedagogy to make certain forms of childhood intelligible to educators and researchers. We analyze different configurations of Robin's identity, taking up questions…

Families who unschool, or home school (at least 2 million kids in the US) usually reach this decision after much deliberation, and after weighing innumerable factors: available time and energy, capacity, desire, and finances. Now, overnight there are hundreds of thousands of young people with no school to go to - compulsory unschooling. While some…

AIR researchers conducted a descriptive study of station rotation. The study described what station rotation looks like in classrooms, examined perspectives about station rotation, and explored student learning associated with station rotation. AIR researchers found that teachers and principals had positive perceptions of station rotation.…