Professional Learning for Busy Educators

For years, education research focused on time-on-task as a measure of effective instruction, says Scott Gest, a professor at the University of Virginia. Through that lens, friends in elementary school appeared to be a negative, an impediment to focus and a catalyst for disruption. Even when the value of strong social ties gained recognition, friendships stood to the side conceptually, as developmentally important but not germane to academics. Yet recent research has confirmed two things many teachers have long believed to be true. First, social-emotional benefits and academic ones don’t operate in isolation. Second, friendships in elementary school can be harnessed to drive academic growth.