Demetrius Fuller developed the HOMies, eight characters who represent eight habits of mind for learners, while he was an art teacher at a Massachusetts elementary school. When students began talking about the HOMies outside their art class, the initiative spread across the school. Linda Nathan, Demetrius Fuller, and Nate Meyers describe the HOMies…

Traditional teacher evaluations -- full-lesson observations, write-ups, and debriefs -- are time-consuming and largely ineffective. As a principal, Kim Marshall found that mini-observations -- short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face coaching conversation and brief narrative summary -- actually improved…

School leaders Lydia Cochrane and Ayesha Hoda have struggled to meet the increasingly complex needs of the students in their schools. As students' needs increase, schools are asked to do more and more, while continuing to have strong academic results. Cochrane and Hoda believe the current system is untenable and needs to change. With Linda Nathan,…

Lyn Mikel Brown and Jenny Flaumenhaft describe the use of student-centered principles to engage in curricular reform in an under-resourced rural elementary school. With a specific focus on student empowerment and self-determination, and in collaboration with students and teachers, Transforming Rural Experience in Education (TREE) integrated…

Over the last 30 years, the school choice movement has been one of the most prominent large-scale reform efforts in American education. In recent years, charter schools and voucher programs, in particular, have been a focus of policy makers and philanthropists. Mark Berends presents an overview of these two models, their prevalence, and what…

Joseph P. McDonald reports findings from a study of nine poverty-impacted schools in New York City striving to more effectively use student performance data in teaching. The study was one of 13 studies of data use at the classroom level across the United States funded by the Spencer Foundation -- an effort intended to fill a serious gap in…

When schools reopen in the fall, students and adults will return carrying stress and trauma arising from the sudden school closings, the social isolation, and the illness and unrest that many experienced over the summer. Rebecca London urges elementary school leaders to attend to students' mental health and emotional needs by offering recess time…

Like many school systems in economically stressed parts of the country, the Everett, Mass., school district had cut back on arts instruction over the years, to the point where most students were getting only a single art class per week. But since 2013, and thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Everett has designed and…

The Mitchell Scarlett Teaching and Learning Collaborative (MSTLC) is a vigorous, six-year-old partnership between two Title I schools--Mitchell Elementary School and Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor, Mich.--and the teacher education program at the University of Michigan. MSTLC was formed between educators who had related but quite different…

Helicopter parents get a bad rap. Teachers and administrators should view them as a resource--not a nuisance. By encouraging open communication, teachers can begin to understand the motivations of these parents and find creative ways to connect them with opportunities to promote their students' academic success and the school's overall…

The author, a former school board member and currently head of nationwide parent organization, assesses the competition between charter and traditional public schools, concluding that the competition and acrimony among them does not help them deliver a better education. Policies should be focused on helping both types of schools improve education,…

The author tells how he employed leadership skills to help turn around a failing school loaded with at-risk students. Dayton's Bluff Elementary School was one of the worst in St. Paul when Von Sheppard took over as principal in 2001. Changing the staff and attitudes at the largely low-income, minority majority school in a tough neighborhood helped…

Success for All, a comprehensive schoolwide reform approach for high-poverty elementary schools, has been successful in spreading itself across the country because of its local and national network of schools willing and able to provide technical and interpersonal support. Title I and other federal policies have contributed to scaling up proven…

School districts on the leading edge of the Birth through Third Grade movement have demonstrated unprecedented success raising the achievement of low-income students by developing coherent strategies focused on the early years of learning and development. These communities are not merely improving preschool. Rather, they are building aligned,…

School uniforms are commonplace in the United Kingdom and seem to help promote students' respect for the teachers, the school, and themselves. Parents like the uniforms because they see it as a less expensive alternative. Teachers say they appreciate school uniforms because they help students focus on school and not each other's clothes. However,…