Popular Educational Trends My

POPULAR EDUCATIONAL
TRENDS
Changing the educational landscape,
often in unpredictable ways. It’s tough to
know exactly what the upcoming school year
will look like, but by keeping up on current
trends in the educational sphere, you can
return to school next year informed, whether
you’re in a classroom or teaching at a
distance.
We’ve rounded up 10 educational trends
and issues you should keep an eye on and
consider researching for your classroom.
Some, like social-emotional learning and
digital citizenship, have long been important
—and they may require even more focus
this year. Others, like genius hour and bite-
sized learning, are recently arrived
educational trends that may have a helpful
place in your classroom.
1. Self-Care
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other
world events, teachers and families may all
be more overwhelmed than ever. This year,
as schools moved to online learning and
teachers scrambled to adjust their
curriculum, many teachers, students, and
parents gained new appreciation for the
value of self-care.
While we don’t fully know what the 2020–
2021 school year will look like yet, it’s sure
that taking care of your overall health and
well-being will be essential for students,
teachers, and parents alike. You may want
to include assignments that
help students manage stress and
make time for your own self-care as a
teacher.
• 2. Blended Learning
• Blended learning is a school or classroom
structure in which students learn partially
from direct teacher instruction and partially
in more self-directed activities.[1] This
mixture might be perfect if students are
learning from both school and home next
year. Although it’s still difficult to predict
how and when students will return to
school, many voices in education—
• 3. Personalized Learning
• Over the past few years, personalized
learning has been on the rise. Why keep
an eye on personalized learning? When
school curriculum is adaptive to a
student’s unique needs, it’s more likely to
promote student progress because each
child can move at their right pace.[2] Plus,
adaptive software programs allow
teachers to use the same program for all
• 4. STEAM Curriculum
• You may be familiar with STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and math)
curriculum and how it prepares students to
enter the workforce with practical, high-
demand skills. But adding the arts
alongside these subjects (thus creating
STEAM: STEM plus arts) can improve
your students’ academic performance.
• For example, adding art assignments to
science and math lessons can help low-
achieving students understand STEM
subjects better. And it improves creativity
—a useful skill for any academic subject.
[3] Plus, STEAM curriculum is shown to
provide students with a more well-rounded
and practical education than STEM alone.
[4]
• 5. Genius Hour
• Genius Hour is a fairly new educational
technique that allows students to work on
self-paced and self-chosen projects for an
hour each day.[5] This encourages
students to practice their creativity and
independent thinking skills, and they can
also develop a genuine love of learning. If
you’re looking for ways to improve student
engagement in your classroom, genius
• 6. Digital Citizenship
• For students, digital citizenship is defined
as the ability to use technology and the
Internet both effectively and appropriately.
Good digital citizenship is increasingly
necessary, but as assignments and
lessons traditionally done in person move
online, students need the skills to develop
a healthy relationship with digital media.
• 7. Bite-Sized Learning
• Bite-sized learning is an educational
technique that provides students with brief,
intensive activities that target specific
academic skills. In a
guest post with Cambridge University Pres
s
, teacher trainer Jade Blue describes it as
an approach that “takes into account the
contemporary demands of learner
• If classes continue to be primarily online
next year, bite-sized learning activities
may be especially useful. A strategic use
of brief activities to teach new skills allows
teachers to take into account a student’s
limited capacity for long and focused
lessons from home. Or, if students return
to your classroom, this technique can still
be useful for making the most of time
spent in class.
• 8. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
• Social-emotional learning continues to be
an important buzzword. When teachers
take time to nurture both a student’s
educational and social-emotional
development, academic progress
improves and classroom behavioral issues
diminish.[6,7] And with the COVID-19
crisis changing many students’ lives in
stressful ways, social-emotional learning
• 9. Gamification
• Looking for ways to make learning fun for
your students? Gamification, a learning
strategy that involves using games and
rewards to teach students, is a strategy
with plenty of both advocates and critics.
• Many rightly discourage the use of
external rewards for learning, but others
counter that when the games and rewards
tap into a child’s intrinsic motivation to
• 10. Experiential Learning
Experiential learning is a strategy that,
according to the UC Denver Experiential
Learning Center, allows students to develop
knowledge and skills in a setting outside of
the classroom. For elementary students,
options for experiential learning may be
limited. But you can still make the most of
this strategy by taking students on field trips
(virtual or otherwise) and providing students

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