From Pocket to Policy: How Schools Navigate Student Smartphones By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern I fit in your pocket, but I can pull you out of a room. I connect you to the world while quietly disconnecting you from the one in front of you. I can answer any question—except whether I should be here at all. What am I? Children are [...]
Goal Setting Is a Skill, So Why Don’t We Teach It? By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern So many of our students’ goals are written for them—by teachers, coaches, school boards, curriculums, and parents. During K–12 education, students are put on a path determined by common development milestones. This path ensures that students can acquire the knowledge and skills they’ll need upon graduation. [...]
Why High School Financial Literacy Can’t Wait Until College By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern For many students, college is their first experience with total financial independence—and simultaneously, it comes with some really big financial decisions. They need to make decisions about student loans, effectively managing their personal finances to pay for bills and necessities, and even whether the financial return of a [...]
Students Need More Than Extracurriculars: The Case for Restorative Hobbies by Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern Between Kindergarten and 12th grade, students are exposed to an incredible array of experiences—subjects, activities, and organizations—which help them develop interests, skills, and life plans. But with the pressure of deciding what they want to do with their lives, students often gravitate towards activities that they think [...]
Three Strategies to Stop Procrastinating Today By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern It’s 6 p.m., and your phone chimes with the calendar reminder you set about that essay. Could it already be due tomorrow? You vaguely remember trying to sit down and work on some research and an outline, but you never got very far into the writing process. You sigh and open [...]
The Love Island Edit: What Teachers Can Learn From Reality TV’s Storytellers By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern What do the editors of Love Island and pre-K teachers have in common? It’s a lot more than being great at pretending that everything is under control! They’re both working overtime to turn absolute chaos into something people can actually follow. Editors shape narratives, pace, [...]
Designing for Belonging: How Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Creates Equitable Access in Higher Education by Olivia Johnson Fall 2025 Intern What is UDL Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that was developed from cognitive neuroscience research, which supports a diverse range of students’ learning needs. Instead of using a “one size fits all” model, UDL encourages teachers to anticipate learner variability [...]
Is Fanfiction the New Charles Dickens? By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern Charles Dickens, one of the greatest English novelists, never intended for his work to be read as full-length novels. His stories first appeared in serial form, as weekly or monthly installments that kept readers on edge, waiting for the next twist in his characters’ lives. Sound familiar? Today’s young readers do [...]
Understanding the Rise of Homeschooling: Data, Drivers, and Implications By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern Six years ago, most parents never imagined becoming their children’s teacher. North American homeschooling has been a highly contentious practice since the establishment of mandatory schooling, marked by legal battles, shifting ideologies, and tensions between parental rights and state control. In many European countries, homeschooling is outlawed or [...]
Habit Forming in K-12 Education By Emma Zande Fall 2025 Intern Test scores among K–12 students have been on the decline since 2013, an issue which has been exacerbated since the pandemic. Research has pointed to a combination of the pandemic-induced learning gap, decreasing attention spans, and increased social media usage as contributing forces to this drop in learning. Some research also indicates [...]