Educators have many "meetings of the minds": Grade-level planning sessions, PLCs, coaching meetings--which together should allow teachers ample opportunities to create high-quality, rigorous lesson plans that deepen student learning. But do these meetings actually work? Frequent planning sessions often become a time for teachers to…

Teachers are frequently told to use "research-based strategies." At the same time, they face unreasonable workloads, with inadequate time and resources to engage with the research and evaluate it themselves. In the same professional development workshops that elevate the importance of research, teachers are also told to focus on…

Familiar and deceptively efficient instructional strategies can be tempting to new teachers who must keep students productively engaged in structured, yet flexible, learning environments. Under the pressure of new responsibilities, novice teachers who are trying to cover the curriculum and manage a classroom of students often end up duplicating…

Students not only vary in their skill level and preferences for academic content, but also in their social-emotional skills, development, and learning. This diversity in the classroom can pose instructional challenges, but it can be also an asset. It presents the opportunity for students to learn from and with one another, gain an understanding of…

High school science teacher Michelle Vanhala reflects on her (sometimes rocky) path to standards-based grading and a grading system that aligned with her educational philosophy.

A disciplinary literacy framework suggests that content-area teachers are best positioned to guide students into discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and communicating, such as teaching science students to write as scientists do. "Disciplinary literacy instruction" can move students beyond generic literacy strategies and prepare…

Self-directed student learning begins with self-directed educators. Teachers in Greenville, North Carolina, are training in the Habits of Mind, a series of thinking behaviors that support self-directed learning by helping students successfully tackle complex problems. The authors outline key instructional strategies that have grown from these…

Authors of the newly revised Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Liesl McConchie and Eric Jensen offer whole-brain approaches teachers can take to engage students in new learning and retaining that knowledge.

Teacher John Hayward believes no classroom can advance far academically unless the teacher has first guided the class to become a community. With a focus on the first days and weeks of school, the author shares strategies any teacher can use to help everyone in the room learn about one another and to show students that he or she will be a…

School change expert Michael Fullan and principal Michelle Pinchot collaborated on an experiment: As Pinchot tackled her first years turning around the culture of Heritage Elementary School in California--using ideas Fullan has promoted about school culture and leveraging teachers' power--she and Fullan checked in every few months on how the work…

Regular education teachers and special educators shouldn't view their jobs as mutually exclusive, writes Jeffrey Benson in this article. He argues that all students benefit when both teachers form collaborative partnerships. Drawing on his four decades of experience in schools, Benson details how regular education teachers can incorporate ideas…

Drawing on their research in creating the Vibrant School Scale, Megan Tschannen-Moran and Davis Clement describe the three characteristics of vibrant schools: enlivened minds, emboldened voices, and playful learning. The authors also detail a four-step, strengths-based process called appreciative inquiry that can help school members have…

From global hunger to the world's water crisis, middle school students at New Jersey's West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District spend the last few days of the school year problem solving about the planet's most dire issues. With the Global Challenge, the school district's administrators not only want to implement an interesting and dynamic…

Wiggins, who has taught in international schools in many countries, describes facets of curriculum, pedagogy, and diverse school communities characteristic of international schools that help forge global-ready graduates. While teaching an interdisciplinary course at the Hong Kong International School, she realized that using internationally…

Although there has been much debate about how "learning loss" is conceptualized and the degree to which the pandemic has affected it (Dickler, 2021; Jacobson, 2021; Strauss, 2021), one thing is certain: the pandemic has likely exacerbated the instructional gaps that students already had, especially in the case of those who attend…