If we can glean any trends from our list of most popular posts published on the Wallace Blog this year, it might be: Everything is connected. From arts education programs focused on urban tweens to performing arts organizations with varied audiences, the question seems to be how to get people in the door. Then once there, how to keep them…just as school districts are struggling to retain principals and might find support in RAND’s groundbreaking principal pipeline research. And speaking of school leaders, their growing concern for children’s social and emotional learning (SEL) is more evident than ever.
We’ve got all that and more in our Top 10 list this year, so go ahead and get connected:
10) The Benefits of Arts Education for Urban Tweens: Does high-quality arts programming benefit urban tweens? What does it take to recruit young people to these programs—and keep them coming back? Read highlights from this webinar hosted by The National Guild for Community Arts Education and drawn from research and practice in our Youth Arts Initiative.
9) Systematic Approach to Developing School Leaders Pays Off for Principal Retention: Principal turnover disrupts schools, teachers and students, and the cost to replace a principal is about $75,000. This blog post investigates the principal retention finding of RAND’s groundbreaking report on building principal pipelines.
8) What If Districts Focused Not Just on Preparing and Hiring Principals But Also Retaining Them: For more on principal retention, Marina Cofield, then the senior executive director of the Office of Leadership at the New York Department of Education, discusses why the nation’s largest school system decided that school leader retention mattered—and what the district did about it.
7) Could Federal Funding Help Pay for Arts Education in Your School? The authors of a report exploring research on approaches to arts education under the Every Student Succeeds Act discuss the types of activities and approaches that qualify for funding, the results arts-education interventions could yield and how educators might use their report to improve arts education in their schools.
6) Five Organizations, Five Different Strategies to Build Arts Audiences: Organizations from our Building Audiences for Sustainability (BAS) initiative share early results from their efforts to tap new audiences while continuing to engage current attendees. As detailed in accounts from our BAS Stories Project, the work of the five varies widely; some strategies show success, some falter and many fall somewhere in between.
5) Implementation Gets the Job Done, Benefitting Kids by Strengthening Practices: Wallace’s recently retired director of research, Ed Pauly, shares insights from his decades-long career into why implementation studies matter, highlighting examples from recent Wallace work.
4) Looking Toward a Nation at Hope: Rooted in findings that academic learning and social and emotional learning are intertwined, a report released earlier this year by The Aspen Institute shares recommendations and next steps for supporting a more holistic learning approach.
3) Choosing the Right Social and Emotional Learning Programs and Practices: More from the SEL front: RAND researchers discuss the importance of social and emotional learning and their new guide meant to help educators adopt evidence-based programs that fit needs of students and communities.
2) What Leading for Equity Can Look Like: Paul Fleming, assistant commissioner for the teachers and Leaders Division at the Tennessee Department of Education, discusses the importance of equity and how a publication on the subject by a statewide team seeks to help schools and districts in Tennessee better support all students.
1) Helping Principals Support Social and Emotional Learning: It’s no surprise that our top post of 2019 falls at the crossroads of school leadership and SEL: Here, guest author Eric Cardwell, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, tells of his conversations with educators around the country and the guide for SEL implementation that came out of them.
