It’s that point of the 12 months when organizations mirror on their “picks” of the previous 12 months. Suppose largest employment tendencies (like hybrid work), worker of the 12 months, and, for language-driven organizations like dictionary publishers and information websites, the Phrase of the Yr.
The Phrase-of-the-Yr custom dates again to a minimum of 1990 when Allan Metcalf, former long-term govt secretary of the American Dialect Society, chosen the society’s first-ever Phrase of the Yr: “bushlips,” which the group defines as “a little-known time period for insincere political rhetoric, created to deride former president George H.W. Bush’s failed marketing campaign promise, Learn my lips: no new taxes.”
Since then, a rising variety of organizations have taken up this annual custom. Merriam-Webster adopted the Phrase of the Yr in 2003, basing its choice on web page hits and standard searches to its web site. Its 2023 decide is “genuine.” Oxford adopted go well with in 2004, choosing a phrase or expression that “attracted an excessive amount of curiosity” throughout the given 12 months. For 2023, it’s “rizz,” brief for charisma.
This 12 months, Training Week is getting in on the custom.
Our methodology was pretty easy, although not precisely scientific. Just a few members of the editorial employees recalled 10 or so phrases that appeared extensively in our 2023 protection. We then matched our recollections in opposition to numbers in our database that informed us precisely what number of instances every of the chosen phrases had appeared in 2023 protection—together with articles, movies, and photograph captions.
Our No. 1 phrase of 2023, which far outpaced virtually each different choice within the variety of instances it popped up in protection, shocked us initially. It additionally reminded us how dedicated our readers are to Training Week’s core mission of empowering the whole Okay-12 training neighborhood with deep insights and actionable sources. With 1,367 mentions since Jan. 1, 2023, Training Week’s 2023 Phrase of the Yr is (cue drum roll)…
Math.
Flashy? No. Essential? Sure. This 12 months, we offered in depth protection on nearly each aspect of math that issues—to complete college programs, particular person educators, dad and mom, and, in fact, college students.
We reported on the disturbing development of declining math proficiency, as evidenced by the newest scores on the Nationwide Evaluation of Instructional Progress (NAEP) arithmetic evaluation. The protection included an interview with Peggy Carr, the commissioner for the Nationwide Middle for Training Statistics, who provided perception on what the longer-term run of declining scores means.
Additionally this 12 months, assistant editor Sarah D. Sparks spent months diving deeply into the subject of math for an enterprise reporting mission investigating the lack of consideration to geometry and statistics in Okay-12 math training.
Listed here are a number of the different math topics we tackled in 2023, grouped loosely by theme.
How and why to show math
We make clear discord about the easiest way to show math, primarily based on lecturers’ and professors’ differing opinions. We additionally explored math lecturers’ general preparedness to show the topic, particularly statistics and geometry, each of which have robust sensible ties to fast-growing professions. We interviewed professionals in a few of these nontraditional math careers—an animator, a well being researcher, and a knowledge journalist—who answered the query: When am I going to make use of this math in actual life?
Math, from an fairness lens
We approached math protection from a lens of guaranteeing that each one college students have a good shot at mastering essential math abilities, for instance, by exploring make math instruction extra accessible to English-learners. We additionally interviewed the CEO of the Calculus Venture, Adrian Mims, whose work focuses on supporting Black and Latino college students in superior highschool math lessons.
Obstacles, outdated and new
We dove into a number of the limitations to studying math, each age-old and model new. Within the former class, we coated why college students wrestle with phrase issues, and the way lecturers may help. We additionally addressed a query college students have been asking perpetually: How is math related?
Additional, we started to look at new math challenges arising from synthetic intelligence, like how math lecturers can adapt their strategies on condition that AI can remedy algebra equations in seconds. Quickly rising academic makes use of and disadvantages to the know-how seemingly will proceed to be a subject we monitor and canopy within the 12 months forward.
Runners-up
Within the meantime, check out the runners-up for Phrase of the Yr in our high 5 protection areas for 2023, primarily based on the variety of instances they appeared in our content material all year long:
- Studying. The transition to instruction primarily based on the “science of studying” continued to be a dominant theme, together with new analysis on key and neglected studying subjects, equivalent to morphology.
- ESSER. Cash talks, and articles on federal Elementary and Secondary College Emergency Aid funding attracted a lot curiosity in 2023.
- Gender. We waded into the controversy surrounding gender-related points in Okay-12 training, from whether or not lecturers must be permitted to show about and even point out the time period in school rooms, to persistent pay gaps alongside gender strains.
- ChatGPT. We wrote extensively about this new AI-driven language processing software and the way it’s reshaping training.
- Restoration. Put up-pandemic educational restoration of scholars’ studying remained a subject of excessive precedence all year long.
