About 150 years ago German educator Friedrich Fröbel opened the world’s first kindergarten, or children’s garden. He felt that young children should play in nature, as opposed to being bombarded with “too many numbers and letters.” Now the birthplace of kindergartens is returning to its roots, with Waldkindergarten, or forest kindergartens. Children ages 3 to 6, walk in a forest outside Frankfurt, inspecting worms, learning about the life cycle of toads, and climbing trees, a recent Wall Street Journal article reports.

While it’s far too early to assess the impact on students who experience this type of early education, some European educators believe that Waldkindergarten kids exercise their imaginations more and are better at concentrating and communicating than their brick-and-mortar peers. Interestingly, the children also appear to get sick less often. The downside? Studies also suggest that the children’s writing skills are less developed, and that they are less adept at distinguishing colors, forms, and sizes.

Highly effective educators may have their own styles, but many use some of the same teaching strategies. The McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) organization put 30 years of research through a meta-analysis and identified nine categories of instructional strategies that have a high probability of improving student achievement. Highly effective teachers foster a cooperative classroom learning environment; require homework and practice; reinforce effort and provide recognition; set goals and provide feedback; activate prior knowledge, and incorporate nonlinguistic representations. They also instruct students to identify similarities and differences, summarize and take notes, and generate and test hypotheses. The identification of these common strategies is further validation for the effectiveness of the Learning A–Z resources. We built these strategies into our Internet-delivered, printable lesson plans for Reading A-Z, Writing A–Z, and Science A–Z.

For some years now we've heard “you are what you eat,” but many of us assumed that adage referred only to our physical health. Healthier food = healthier body. But a new research study from the University of Alberta demonstrates that eating certain foods helps the brain's ability to learn. While this comes as no surprise to most teachers, it is heartening to see it quantified by researchers.

The team, led by Dr. Paul J. Veugelers, surveyed more than 5,000 fifth-graders in Canada, collecting information on diet, height, and weight to determine a Diet Quality Index-International (DQI-I) score. The students who ate more fruits, vegetables, grains, and less fat had the healthiest DQI-I, and those who ate more saturated fat and salt had the least healthy DQI-I. (Are you still with me?) Dr. Veugelers' team then compared the DQI-I results with standardized literary performance. The results were impressive: The students with the healthiest DQI-I were 41% more likely to perform well on the literacy test.

The study's authors feel their results support investing in school nutrition programs to improve academic performance as well as health. I agree: Let's keep making strides in improving our students and giving them every tool they need to succeed, starting from the inside out.

The National Center for Learning Disabilities recently launched a new website for the RTI Action Network. RTI—Response to Intervention—is a way of identifying and helping struggling students. It closely monitors student progress from preschool through high school, providing necessary special instruction. The RTI Action Network's mission is to support parents and teachers so that all struggling students are identified early and receive the necessary support to be successful.

Differentiated, tiered instructional materials are crucial to making RTI work. Learning A–Z's differentiated learning products align closely with the models described on the website. The Learning A–Z family of websites provides unique instructional solutions that encourage and engage students at all achievement levels. You might like to check the free samples available on all the Learning A–Z websites.

It's common knowledge that in many regions of our country, the teaching professionals shaping our future often don't earn a decent living wage. A recent seven-state survey on teacher compensation puts cold, hard numbers to that sad reality. The U.S. Department of Education compiled 2005–2006 data for teachers who work full time in public schools in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Median salaries ranged from $34,631 in Oklahoma to $44,777 in Colorado, according to the survey. Median experience ranged from eight to 15 years, with teacher age between 43 and 45. A bachelor's degree was the highest educational level achieved by 58 percent of teachers surveyed.

These survey results should be a wake-up call to our nation. Teachers work long, hard hours and need some incentive to add to that already cramped schedule to further develop their skills. Higher pay would encourage teachers to expand their education either before their careers take off or as their careers progress. With more tangible rewards and more teachers eager to continue their education, increasing numbers of new teachers would enter the field, and teacher retention rate would increase.

At the end of the day, most of all, low teacher pay hurts our children and the future of our country.