On the surface, this trickle-down view of educational change--what T. Nichols calls "innovation-from-above"--makes sense. Teachers learn about new devices, apps, teaching techniques, and leadership strategies as they show up in articles, reports, and other professional resources, or after they have already been implemented elsewhere.…

Our traditional professional development format at faculty meetings felt tired. While our schools--Constable and Monmouth Junction Elementary Schools in the South Brunswick School District in New Jersey--are known for their commitment to meaningful and innovative professional development for staff, weekly Monday faculty meetings didn't always…

Innovative teaching means the teacher is the creator, but unfortunately it does not necessarily mean the same for the students. Innovation is not just "doing" something new; it is "thinking" of new ways to improve a product, a method, or an idea. How can educators teach students to become better innovators themselves? This…

High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

The Clayton Christiansen Institute maintains a database of more than 400 schools across the United States that have implemented some form of blended learning, which combines online learning with brick-and-mortar classrooms. Data the Institute has collected over the past six months suggests three trends as this model continues to evolve and mature.…

Throughout the pandemic, the Getting Smart team (which Tom Vander Ark leads as CEO) worked with public school districts in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, as well as charter schools in six additional states to support hybrid, virtual, and return-to-school strategies and plans. During the year and a half that education systems spent in crisis…

It's easy to make excuses for not integrating technology into classes, and some of these excuses do have merit. If teachers plan on making the effort to overcome these difficulties, they must believe strongly in the strategies they select and stick to them long enough to at least test their effectiveness. Technology use is sometimes referred…

Digital learners are hungry to use technology in school. And many schools are responding by delivering cutting-edge equipment to all teachers and students and infusing this technology into instruction. This is all well and good. But as evaluators with the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, the authors have observed several major…

In an interview with Educational Leadership, Frederick M. Hess talks about greenfield schooling--a policy approach that attempts to knock down the formal and informal barriers that stand in the way of innovation in education. Greenfield schooling, he explains, "doesn't imagine that we should go around razing districts or schools or taking…

High-achieving kids from low-income families too often fall into the achievement trap; as they progress up the grades, their academic performance falls, and they are far less likely to remain star students than are middle-class or wealthy high-achievers. So says the first U.S.-wide analysis of high-achieving students from poor families (published…

Two innovative programs in Belgium promote both educational equity and quality as they reach out to ethnically diverse families. The Bridge Person project in Ghent addresses Belgium's immigrant achievement gap by creating meaningful relationships between schools and socially disadvantaged families. The School in Sight project in Antwerp seeks to…