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ASCD Blog's New Look
Easily find the strategies, videos, commentary, and other free resources you need to teach and lead at ASCD's redesigned Inservice blog. Bookmark or subscribe to updates at www.ascd.org/blog.
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Common Core and Leadership
Learn more about ASCD's newest two-day institutes available this summer.
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2012 Summer Conference
With 140 sessions, this year's Summer Conference, taking place July 1–3 in St. Louis, Mo., will focus on how educators are revolutionizing the way they teach and lead.
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Free ASCD Shipping!
Online orders of $75 or more ship free in June throughout the continental United States. Check out the ASCD Online Store.
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Free Webinars
Top education experts are tackling the challenges you face. Learn more about our webinar series.
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Teaching Inference
Long before college work, students need to be taught how to draw conclusions and understandings from various strands of evidence, materials, or situations. Specific strategies for inferring include inductive learning, understanding mystery, finding the main idea, and investigation, say ASCD authors Harvey Silver, Thomas Dewing, and Matthew Perini in their new book Inference: Teaching Students to Develop Hypotheses, Evaluate Evidence, and Draw Logical Conclusions.
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Blog Watch:
Building Better Ed-Tech Bridges
EdTech Researcher, written by Justin Reich, intends to build bridges between educators who use tech and researchers who want to understand tech's effect on learning.
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A Collaborative Approach to Education Reform
School reforms are more likely to get off the ground and succeed if stakeholders share ideas and take action together. This issue will highlight stories of innovative collaboration among education stakeholders, whether within a school, between a school and community, across districts, or even across countries and cultures.
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Anchoring the Academically Adrift
Last year, the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses took U.S. higher learning to task for failing to academically challenge many college students. The book's authors examined data about what students learn in the first two years of college and concluded that 45 percent of college students show little if any increase in academic learning as measured by skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. The authors measure that even after four years of college, 36 percent of students have essentially stood in place.
Although critics have questioned the book's scary percentages showing the lack of students' intellectual growth in higher education, there's plenty of other evidence that colleges have increasingly provided remedial courses to help vast numbers of freshmen deal with college academics.
How much of that responsibility for a failure of academic rigor falls on U.S. secondary school education? This issue of ASCD Express offers some suggestions and examples of what schools are doing to better prepare students for college work.
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Enlightening Minds:
Preparing Critical Thinkers for Life After High School
 Giving secondary students complex texts and probing and productive questions to stimulate student conversation and writing can prepare students for college and careers, writes Karen McDaniels, who provides literacy support for struggling schools in south Florida.
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Habits of Success
To become skillful thinkers, pass tests, and complete entry-level college courses, students need a set of key cognitive strategies—such as goal setting, time management, and persistence—that enable them to apply what they know and what they are learning in complex ways.
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Meet the Needs of Struggling Students Before College
A failing school's major turnaround effort allowed it to build in extra opportunities to meet struggling students' academic needs with a variety of programs that also addressed study, social skills, and student engagement.
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Reforming for Rigor and Achievement
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How Demanding Is College Learning?
 In this interview, Academically Adrift coauthor Richard Arum explains why colleges' failure to challenge their students academically typically hurts the most disadvantaged students.
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Tech for Teachers:
Google Docs Ease Collaborative Thinking and Writing
 Tech columnist Jason Bedell explains how Google Docs eases collaboration for group writing projects, presentations, mentoring, and sharing feedback.
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My Back Pages:
Is the American High School Serving Today's Youth? (1949)
According to a poll of students and secondary teachers taken by Educational Leadership in 1949, helping students prepare for a trade or profession was high school teachers' highest priority. How differently might today's students and teachers answer a similar survey?
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Nurture the Quest for Knowledge—Not Grades
 Changing how schools assess, evaluate, and grade will help foster students' love of learning and promote academic rigor before they get to college, writes Joy Manstream.
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