Just like their students, teachers face mental health struggles in their classrooms. Many of them must learn to cope with teacher-facing trauma while balancing students' needs and commitment to teaching, which is emotionally exhausting. Authors Christine E. Hood, Ilana Horn, Katherine Schneeberger McGugan, Karen Underwood, Jessica Smith, and…

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…

The author lays out guidelines and suggestions for how teachers can actually become policy leaders, taken from his book, "The Cage-Busting Teacher" (Harvard Education Press, 2015). Teachers serious about leadership can get the ear of policy makers by leveraging their positional and moral authority--though they may need to be persistent…

Restrictions on collective bargaining are spreading. But while reformers are right to question current labor practices in education, they're wrong to believe that bargaining prohibitions will solve the problems. A smarter approach would begin by putting down the sledgehammer wielded in Wisconsin and picking up a scalpel by pushing for laws aimed…

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…

Tunica County, Mississippi, in the heart of the delta, has been home to stagnant academic achievement even as federal and state funds increased. A teacher-focused professional development program through the University of Mississippi helped yield higher scores and national recognition for an elementary school. It also revealed some learnings:…

A consensus is emerging about how school leaders affect school performance, and how important principals are to improved student learning. Yet the national reform policies--No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (RTT)--incorporate assumptions about school and district leadership that are very much at odds with this research. NCLB and RTT call…

Teachers need to be taught how to collaborate. When the Stamford (Conn.) Public Schools introduced PLCs in the district's 20 schools, they learned of the four roles that districts play when implementing PLCs systemwide: 1) Districts must involve teachers and administrators in developing and leading the PLC process, 2) they must teach…

Many principals use harassing supervision to encourage low-performing teachers to leave. Principals are driven to this tactic because teacher evaluation systems don't systematically identify low-performing teachers, principals don't understand the teacher removal process, principal training programs don't build principal expertise in hiring and…

Chula Vista Elementary School District, the largest in California, dramatically raised its student achievement while taking on increasing proportions of English learners by focusing on what it calls teacher talk--the way lessons are developed, delivered, and executed.

Through the process of initiating, implementing, and sustaining a schoolwide professional learning community (PLC), teachers and administrators at the pseudonymous Silver Valley Middle School provide a powerful example of distributed leadership in action. New leadership roles, coordination, and interdependency among staff have led to an increased…

Having studied schools in the past eight years that have high concentrations of students living in poverty, but who consistently exceed the performance of similarly impoverished schools, the authors conclude that such higher-performing schools share common characteristics setting them apart. The three most essential are: Teachers, administrators,…

Given the centrality of leadership for school success, leader morale and effectiveness in tough times can't be overemphasized. The authors' work examined how principals and superintendents deal with and are affected by a significant economic downturn. They surveyed 93 principals from one large upper-Midwest metropolitan area and 100…

The numbers are in, and they are not rosy. According to the "Schools and Staffing Survey," 64,954 public schools reported vacancies during the 2003-04 school year. Even more alarming is the fact that projections suggest teacher attrition rates will continue to soar, while student enrollments climb, well into the 21st century. American schools have…

Critiques 12 methods of and approaches to teacher evaluation. Concludes that the goal-setting approach in which the teacher and administrator establish mutually agreed-upon instructional goals and objectives is the best, as other techniques may isolate teachers and administrators and establish adversary rather than cooperative relationships.…