Even under ideal conditions, teaching is tough work. Facing unrelenting pressure from administrators and parents and caught in a race against time to improve student outcomes, educators can easily become discouraged (or worse, burn out completely) without a robust coaching system in place to support them. For more than 20 years, perfecting such a…

When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students' education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller "School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action," presents tools and guidelines to help develop more…

As a result of the U.S. Department of Education's near one-billion-dollar investment in the "Teaching American History" ("TAH") grant program since 2001, almost 1,200 projects have taken place in school districts around the country with the important aim of improving the teaching of American history in K-12 classrooms. The…

Background: The Whole Child approach and the coordinated school health (CSH) approach both address the physical and emotional needs of students. However, a unified approach acceptable to both the health and education communities is needed to assure that students are healthy and ready to learn. Methods: During spring 2013, the ASCD (formerly known…

The United States of America has seen a decline in the number of individuals pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics or STEM. With an understanding that in order to stay competitive in the global economy, the United States must enhance its pipeline towards STEM disciplines. Schools must find a way to motivate and…

Emphasis on improving student learning has brought increased attention to the execution of schoolwide instructional reforms in general and the use of data by teacher teams in particular as an expected element of a school's instructional reform strategy. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to focus important attention on the work…

Education leaders across the country confront a growing challenge: too many students are not college ready when they leave high school. Although indicators exist to identify students at risk of dropping out of high school, few indicators of students' college readiness are currently in place, and few districts have linked indicators to practices…

Results from the survey of faculty who teach in an alternative teacher certification program provided a framework to develop a holistic programmatic assessment of student learning outcomes for a newly developed online program. Research highlights the process of determining student learning outcomes identification and appropriate courses and best…

Today’s schools are complex systems with complex problems. Addressing those problems often requires significant change efforts. However, many school administrators don’t know how to select a focus for these efforts or how to lead staff through such changes--and even if they did, the job is too large for one person. One solution to this dilemma is…