Literacy can be a big predictor of how a child will do in school—and even whether they’ll graduate. There’s a lot families can do to support a young reader at home. This collection of Teach. Learn. Grow. blog posts by NWEA literacy experts will walk you through exactly what to try. (If you’re an educator eager to support families reading at home, please share this e-book with them!)

Chase Nordengren shares research-based, actionable strategies for making goal setting part of your instructional practice. Learn tips for using goals to drive growth and discover how goal setting can lead to a deeper exploration of responsive teaching and learning.

For our final episode on student agency, we thought it was time to help our students set some better goals. So, we brought in Chase Nordengren, senior research scientist at NWEA and author of the forthcoming book, Step Into Student Goal Setting (Corwin, Jan 2022).

In this episode, we present the five principles of assessment empowerment—learner context, learning environments and relationships, appropriate purpose, responsive learning cycles, communication—and offer listeners strategies they can try for each.

In this episode, we discuss information why and how teaching programs fail to prepare gen ed teachers for working with students with disabilities, break down a few common myths about students with disabilities, and give teachers actionable ideas and strategies for building student agency with their entire class. Our guests are two NWEA experts in special education: Douglas Buttorff (content designer) and Elizabeth Barker (accessibility research scientist).

In this discussion, we cover how to recognize the assets emergent bilingual students bring with them, how to get back into the groove of academic language, and how to make room for both language and communication with English language learners.

In this conversation, we venture into the domain specific ways we, as educators, can empower students within our classrooms.