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…

Calls for schools to pay heed to children's social and emotional learning have proliferated in recent years. Is the current enthusiasm for educating the "whole learner" a much-needed correction to the narrow concentration on academic skills in the modern reform era? Or is it a misguided retreat from academic rigor and an attempt to…

This article offers interview responses from Thomas Hébert, a professor of gifted and talented education in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. Hébert was previously a faculty member at the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. He has more than a decade of K-12 classroom experiences working with gifted…

In John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," he outlines several critical failings in which social scientists bear a responsibility for potentially a great deal of damage toward children, society, and notably, the planet itself. The nature of the damage appears to be one of…

Meria Carstarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, has nearly 20 years of experience in educational leadership, primarily in urban school districts. Her previous roles included superintendent in Austin, Texas, from 2009 to 2014 and administrator in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia. She serves as a commissioner and…

Robert McGrath's article has the great virtue of asking an important question: "What is character education?" He argues that currently "what it means to call something a character education program remains unclear." Without a clear definition, McGrath says, one cannot differentiate character education from other programs…

Sally Reis's research interests are related to talent development in all children as well as special populations of gifted and talented students, including students with learning disabilities, gifted females, and diverse groups of talented students who are often underserved. She is also interested in extensions of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model…

A growing number of advocacy groups, educators, and families are concerned that something important is missing from modern public education. They recognize the necessity of students making progress in their math and reading abilities, but they fear that a narrow focus on those subjects has caused schools to neglect other essential aspects of…

Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb provide an elegant and helpful framework that integrates neuroscientific and education research on social affective development in their article, "Embodied Brains, Social Minds, Cultural Meaning: Integrating Neuroscientific and Educational Research on Social-Affective Development." Based on previous research,…

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…

The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) believes it is essential to define giftedness in a way that both reflects best thinking in the field and moves beyond a focus on identification criteria to a deeper understanding of the complex nature of giftedness and the multi-faceted approach to services required to appropriately serve…

In this reflective conversation, Marianne Kuzujanakis, a pediatrician and homeschool educator to a profoundly gifted child, discusses her involvement with gifted kids, which began when she approached Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG), a nonprofit gifted support organization. She became fully active in supporting the gifted after her…

Though there is extensive research on the health outcomes of individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), society at large has not embraced this ground-breaking research and many still believe that the use of harsh punishment for students provides the same intended result as a discipline approach that teaches coping…

The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance of education itself. It is not a distraction from the "real work" of math and English instruction; it is how instruction can succeed. And it is not another reason for political polarization. It brings together a traditionally…