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The author reflects on the Common Core State Standards in 2022, which guides states and school districts in the U.S. on issuing sets of standards for subjects. Topics discussed include the evolution of standards and tests in schools in the country, a bill signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence that pulls the state from the reading and math education standards, and the adoption of a new set of education benchmarks in Missouri.

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This study, emerging from a larger, longitudinal research project, reports about a cohort (n = 13) of beginning teachers' professional agency and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the social-ecological perspective, the participants perceived their professional agency as both temporal and relational phenomena by interacting within their current circumstances. The participants' professional agency focused on facilitating students' online learning. Meanwhile, the participants strove to achieve four types of resilience, i.e. personal, professional, institutional and community. These types of resilience supported their capacity to remain committed to learning to teach during the pandemic. Implications for facilitating teachers' professional agency and resilience are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the large increase in online instruction, including remote instruction with online materials during the COVID-19 pandemic, there also was an increase in the use of instructional materials that were made to be displayed online or were digitized for online use. However, teachers have not had access to guidance about how to select and evaluate online instructional materials for classroom use. The lack of guidance has the potential to harm historically excluded populations of students and could frustrate teachers as they learn to teach with digital materials. The purpose of this paper is to share the 4A Framework for evaluating online instructional materials. The framework is organized around the premise that quality online instructional materials are accessible, promote active engagement, advocate for inclusion, and are accountable for their relationships to standards and data privacy. Each feature is discussed and examples of teacher work in applying the framework are shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students with disabilities and their parents face additional challenges in any educational environment, but little previous research maps these challenges in a online schools. The purpose of this study was to understand parent perceptions of IDEA implementation for children with disabilities during the transition to fully online schooling. Specifically, the study focused on special education services and the preparation parents received for their new roles as on-site mentors. Multiple research strategies were used, including a survey of 58 parents and individual interviews with 15 respondents of those surveys. Findings of this study suggest that a generally welcoming demeanor of online school staff is integral to parent perceptions of the quality of the transition. However, two issues from the findings of this study raise concerns about state policies and local providers. First, students are losing many special education services without replacements appropriate to the online setting and, second, parents lack understandings about their changing roles when they enroll their children in online schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children learn literacies as social practices in context. Increasingly, these contexts include technological tools. Moreover, children engage with psychosocial identity tasks that involve more than cognitive growth. With the rapid rise in digital personalisation, there is a need to consider ways to ensure that digital technologies attend to literacies using understandings about psychosocial development. In this paper, we share ideas from Erik Erikson about the psychosocial tasks children must achieve in their communities from infancy and we relate these to literacy. The psychosocial tasks are trust, autonomy, initiative and industry. We explain how digital personalisation efforts might contribute to holistic psychosocial development that are also supportive of expansive literacies. Then, we make three recommendations for enhancing the digital personalisation efforts. These include attending to identity tasks, considering multiple types of growth simultaneously and involving multiple systems (eg, parents, caregivers and community) in planning, implementing and evaluating personalised instructional materials for young children. Practitioner notesWhat is already known Personalisation is a concept centred on meeting learners' individual needs.Digital personalisation tools and practices for young children have not fully leveraged unique aspects of childhood versus other phases of life.What this paper adds Digital personalisation processes for young children can be enhanced through psychosocial considerations within social contexts, particularly for literacy learning.Psychosocial developmental theories offer new ways to think about how to involve parents and other caregivers in digital personalisation processes.Implications for practice Planners, implementers and evaluators of digital personalised instructional materials should tether their efforts to psychosocial identity tasks.Planners, implementers and evaluators should also consider ways to layer multiple types of learning (cognitive, social and psychological) within identity tasks.Planners, implementers and evaluators should work to include multiple support systems (parents, educators and communities) in their efforts to personalise digital activities and materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universal design for learning (UDL) is a research-based framework intended to optimise student learning by including student choice of content, process, and product in design. The UDL model recommends presenting course content in multiple ways, providing students various options for engagement, and then facilitating choice in expressing knowledge and skills. While previous research has shown that higher education instructors benefit from professional learning about UDL, little is known about the social and intellectual investments instructors make during these professional learning events. This study used qualitative research methods and a sociocultural definition of investment to investigate faculty development in a highly-ranked liberal arts university in the Midwest United States during a series of UDL workshops. Instructors invested in accordance with their beliefs that UDL could improve student engagement, enable them to teach more content, and develop important professional relationships with other instructors who also attended the workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are approaching the 20‐month mark on the historic closure of school buildings and the move to remote instruction doe to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Public health directives currently allow options for remote, online, blended, and fully in‐person educational delivery in some parts of the world, but there is still a need for precautions and vigilance. Due to these circumstances, the need for policies that support online and digital learning has increased. This column argues for the need to consider digital literacies as part of comprehensive plans for online learning inside and outside of pandemic. The author provides background information on the various levels of preparation for pandemic learning in various US states, familiarizes readers with some current plans in state legislatures about online learning, and theorizes how digital literacies might be included in policies moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging research base has highlighted various roles and responsibilities that parents of students with disabilities accept when they enroll their children in online schools. Since finding and using online texts and using various programs and applications that require search and evaluation skills to do work are typical for online learning, it follows that part of parent responsibilities in many families might involve using basic technological literacies or even more advanced digital ones. To focus on the range of technological literacies that parents employ, researchers gathered self-report data from parents about how they engage with online education technologies while working with their children with disabilities. Interviews with (n = 32) parents across six states in the West, Midwest, and Southern United States revealed that parents employ various skills with a specific set of purposes in mind. Literacies were used to (a) perform basic technological computing tasks, (b) evaluate information to supplement existing instructional materials, and (c) communicate with the school about children's needs. Reported purposes for using these skills emerged as (a) instructing, (b) monitoring, (c) advocating, and (d) learning school expectations. Implications of this study include the potential for literacy-based approaches to parent preparation for supporting vulnerable children in online settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity for institutions of higher education to increase their use of online instructional delivery models and tools. Instructional designers played a role in supporting instructors to make this transition. This support included professional learning opportunities in the form of workshops and coaching. The purpose of this study was to investigate instructional designers' shifting thinking about the professional learning experiences they are providing and will provide for instructors in institutions of higher education during the pandemic and beyond. Six instructional designers from four universities participated in two focus groups for this study. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. The instructional designers in this study viewed professional learning during the pandemic as a time to address what they saw as persistent problems with online learning. Moreover, they indicated a willingness to engage in extended faculty development to explore mutually identified challenges with online teaching and learning in their contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]