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The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time, but it can also be quite anxiety-provoking for many students. Some students are attending school for the first time and others are moving into a new classroom with a teacher and peers they do not yet know.

In the 2021–2022 school year, beginning of the year anxieties may be magnified, as many students and their teachers will be returning to the classroom for the first time in more than a year. Here is a list of five things that teachers should consider doing on the first day of class.

Teachers have taught us much about how to foster rich engagement with students despite our shared struggles during the pandemic.

In a research brief, Reimagining Schools? Undoing Disparities in Student Engagement, Professors Bruce Fuller and Zachary Pardos describe lessons learned from 18 California charter schools as their research team analyzed 44 class sessions taught via Zoom over a 15-month period.

The Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans (BIFYA) announced today that they are the recipients of a research award from California 100, an ambitious statewide initiative to envision and shape the long-term success of the state.

GSE alumna Jean Yonemura Wing, PhD ’02, MA ’98, who served as Executive Director of Research, Assessment and Data in the Oakland Unified School District for 16 years, and was a member of the OUSD-UC Berkeley Research-Practice Partnership steering committee, passed away March 29, 2021, at the age of 70. Although employed by the Oakland Unified School District, her commitment to educational equity and social justice knew no bounds.

At age 10, Robert Ruddell crawled through the attic of his family’s West Virginia farmhouse to help connect wires that would for the first time give them electricity. It sparked his dreams of being an electrician.

A classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over in the hope of getting a different result. That’s what we’re doing in the nation’s schools. Trying to conduct business as almost-usual in our schools after COVID-19 hit this past spring resulted in pure chaos. It won’t be any different this time around. We need to push the reset button.

Although the meaning of, role, and distinction between ideology and violence have been contested in social theory, the COVID and Black Lives Matter era has put them front and center. Specifically, with the rise of police violence that has resulted in the disproportionate and fatal shootings of young black men, violence toward black people increases Americans’ attention to institutionalized anti-black racism. Even more worrisome is the state’s role in sanctioning said violence through its police force.

Meeting students where they are. Being creative with differentiated curriculum. These instructional concepts have been researched for decades as ways to improve equity in schools, increase student engagement, and ultimately boost academic outcomes.

While implementation varies, it is common to hear educators discussing best practices in these terms. Debates continue, however, when it comes to the literacy education of emergent bilingual students.