Teaching Quality

University of Washington College of Education Professor James Mazza, a former president of the American Association of Suicidology, recently answered questions about youth suicide, mental health issues and the role of educators during a Facebook Live chat.

Tleena Ives grew up immersed in the language and culture of her Native people, the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe—knowledge gleaned from her extended family and her early education.

"My memories from my early experience in education included learning to speak in S'Klallam, learning our traditional songs and dances, and being instilled with a great sense of cultural identity," Ives said.

So when it came to the education of her own four children, she worked ardently as a parent volunteer to help shape the tribe's early learning curriculum to reflect this important heritage.

A three-year, teacher-researcher partnership focused on the implementation of Next Generation Science Standards in an urban kindergarten classroom highlights how a designed learning environment can support the learning of emergent bilingual students.

Examples of sustained instructional improvement across an entire school district are rare, but a five-year research-practice partnership between the University of Washington College of Education and a mid-sized urban district highlights the power of networked educators.

Learning how to use evidence in making an argument is a critical skill for students to build, yet difficulties frequently arise when discipline-based learning goals conflict with schooling tasks.

University of Washington College of Education researchers took on that challenge by partnering with teachers of a project-based AP Environmental Science course to develop and revise design principles for creating "material tools" that can adequately scaffold disciplinary practice and support formative assessment, while also helping students' create better arguments.

For education leaders across the country, a perpetually vexing problem is how to sustain improvement in instruction across schools over an extended period.

Kara Jackson, associate professor of mathematics education at the University of Washington College of Education, notes that while there’s a wealth of research on how to improve teaching practice and student outcomes, that progress is hard to scale beyond individual classrooms or a single school.

As a 6th grade math teacher in Highline School District, Raphael Munavu’s passion for social justice defines his approach to teaching math.

With every lesson, he strives to help students connect math to their own lives, enabling them to think critically about the world around them.

The following story was originally published in the March 2018 edition of Columns magazine.

On a chilly day in November, the third grade classroom in Seattle’s John Muir Elementary School is cozy. Colorful posters cover the walls and beneath them, children fidget and giggle. The teacher, Marjorie Lamarre, urges the class to quiet down and gather in a circle on a big red mat.

As a high school student in South Korea, University of Washington College of Education PhD student Soo-Yean Shim was already imagining alternative approaches to make science classes engaging for all students.

Her inspiration came during a transformative experience in which she joined a genetics research team at a local university. In helping the team collect data, Shim found herself making sense of the world using resources and experimental data that she had gathered herself.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Washington College of Education No. 9 among the nation's best education schools in its annual graduate school ratings, released March 20.

UW College of Education ranked No. 3 among education schools at public institutions in the U.S. in the 2019 edition of the U.S. News ratings. This is the fifth consecutive year that UW has been ranked third or higher among public institutions by U.S. News.