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  After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?   In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.   Most importantly, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.   Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.   Book: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt                     ISBN-10: 0241694906                     ISBN-13: 978-0241694909 Read more

* If you are new to BRIDGE, you must create an account and take the mandatory Introduction course before adding courses to your cart.  Podcast PD is an asynchronous and new format for professional development and learning that is being offered by SDEA. You listen and reflect as time allows without having to meet weekly deadlines, meet in person, or access Zoom meetings.   Podcast PD allows educators to make personal choices for their learning based on their content area and professional interests while helping them to earn up to five credits.   With five different podcasts to choose from you can choose any of the sessions that relate to education, professional interest, content that work for you. Each session requires a reflection paper. Participants can mix and match podcasts to meet the requirements for credit.   The five podcasts that can be used for credit: School ME neaToday Angela Watson’s Truth for Teachers Podcast The Cult of Pedagogy The Resilient Teacher Podcast with host Brittany Blackwell, M.Ed. Special Education for Beginners with Jennifer Hofferber Read more

"That’s the problem with you, Minor” a student huffed. “You want to make everything about reading or math. It’s not always about that. At school, you guys do everything except listen to me. Y’all want to use your essays and vocabulary words to save my future, but none of y’all know anything about saving my now.”   In We Got This Cornelius Minor describes how this conversation moved him toward realizing that listening to children is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do. By listening carefully, Cornelius discovered something that kids find themselves having to communicate far too often. That “my lessons were not, at all, linked to that student’s reality.” While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. What we hear can spark action that allows us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children. A lone teacher can’t eliminate inequity, but Cornelius demonstrates that a lone teacher can confront the scholastic manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism and classism by showing: exactly how he plans and revises lessons to ensure access and equity ways to look anew at explicit and tacit rules that consistently affect groups of students unequally suggestions for leaning into classroom community when it feels like the kids are against you ideas for using universal design that make curriculum relevant and accessible advocacy strategies for making classroom and schoolwide changes that expand access to opportunity to your students   “We cannot guarantee outcomes, but we can guarantee access” Cornelius writes. “We can ensure that everyone gets a shot. In this book we get to do that. Together. Consider this book a manual for how to begin that brilliantly messy work. We got this.”     Book: We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be by Cornelius Minor                     ISBN-10: 032509814X                     ISBN-13: 978-0325098142 Read more

Do you need to ramp up your classroom questioning techniques? Questions are the driving force of learning in classrooms. Hacking Questions digs into framing, delivering, and maximizing questions in the classroom to keep students engaged in learning. Known in education circles as the "Questioning Guru," Connie Hamilton shows teachers of all subjects and grades how to: Hear the music: listen for correct answers Scaffold to trigger student thinking without doing it for them Kick the IDK bucket to avoid “I don’t know” as the final answer Punctuate your learning time to end with reflection questions Spin the throttle to fuel students to ask the questions Fill your back pocket with engagement questions Make yourself invisible by establishing student-centered protocols Be a Pinball Wizard and turn students into facilitators Book: “Hacking Questions: 11 Answers That Create a Culture of Inquiry in Your Classroom” by Connie Hamilton                     ISBN-10: 1948212145                     ISBN-13: 978-1948212144 Read more

This course initiates the purpose and direction of student-teacher relations to fully conceptualize teaching and learning in this context. Fundamental understanding of building relationships, communication practices, student teacher needs, strategies and planning for collaborative efforts, and recognition of professional teaching attributes will form the core of this course. This course will run from January 13 - May 2, 2025. Those whose student teachers have split placements (fine arts, SPED, etc.) may also register for this course; there is a condensed course schedule recommended for split placements. *This is a dual-enrollment course. You must also be enrolled through USD:  EDFN 592 UE1 28707 Cooperating Teacher Experience https://aceware.usd.edu/wconnect/CourseStatus.awp?&course=25SP-28707 The registration deadline is January 21, 2025 **Please note that while there are 33 modules, many modules can be completed in ten minutes or less. The total estimated time commitment for this course is 15 hours.  Read more

Think back to your most engaging experience as a student. What made it so exhilarating and memorable? What made it so effective? Such questions about student engagement obsessed Weston Kieschnick from his earliest days as a teacher. Today, Kieschnick travels the globe to keynote and coach educators on the topics most relevant to student success. In the intervening decades, Kieschnick refined his teaching craft, observed the most captivating teachers, and studied the best speakers to reverse engineer a student engagement formula. The result is the ATLAS model—a simple, five-point roadmap for capturing student engagement in the first moments of class sustaining it all the way to the last. The Educator's ATLAS holds both learner needs and teacher wisdom in equal importance. Central to this is a definition of student engagement that—once and for all—clarifies the teacher’s actionable role. Teachers will finish this book with a plan in hand and the full confidence that they are ready to be engagement pros. And as is always the case with Kieschnick’s books, readers will laugh and have a lot of fun along the way.   Book: “The Educator’s ATLAS”                     ISBN-10: 1736199684                     ISBN-13: 978-1736199688 Read more