Teachers spend tremendous amounts of time giving students feedback and grades. Their efforts fill weekends, late nights, and planning periods. The time they spend correcting student misconceptions, engaging with their thoughts, and coaching them toward deeper intellectual work is often deeply intertwined with their identity as educators. In their…

Schools are facing a growing number of disaffected parents. To win them back, says one policy analyst, educators need to take their concerns to heart. After two-and-a-half pandemic years, writes policy analyst Robert Pondiscio, public schools are facing a growing number of disaffected parents--a trend reflected in declining enrollments. Pondiscio…

This article discusses the prevention interview, a one-to-one interview with a student, asking open-ended questions. Prevention interviews help educators learn about the whole young person to build trust that allows for new solutions for recurring problems. Prevention interviews also work well when done soon after a student has made poor behavior…

The logic behind "continuous improvement" sounds simple--but it takes a skillful leader to make the process pay off. While the logic behind the popular "continuous improvement" process seems simple, the authors' study of schools using approaches based on continuous improvement revealed that skilled leadership is as important as…

Parents know their children best. When schools build relationships with the families of English learners, students benefit. In this article, learn three essential actions from which you can cultivate an engaging and welcoming school community: (1) create a supportive learning environment, (2) make resources multilingual and multimodal, and (3)…

When it comes to educational equity, we are all part of the problem--and we can all be part of the solution. Here, Shane Safir describes how instructional leaders can put the "warm demander" coaching model into practice. "Warm demanders," she explains, expect a great deal of their colleagues, convince them of their own capacity…

When the members of a team of educators are confident they have the ability to make a difference in a school, it can have a significant impact on school culture and achievement. In this article, the authors discuss the ways that collective efficacy (or its absence) manifests in a school and offer suggestions for leaders on how to develop it. Key…

Educators who encounter children facing trauma, present and past, can draw on practices that help all students--like building relationships and helping kids create their own "wellness tools" to handle challenging emotions. See how this educator weaves children's literature and art into practices like these.

"We often say to one another that "students won't care what you know until they know that you care," and this may be true. But our students' knowledge that they are cared for depends on what we do far more than on what we say," writes Eric Toshalis. In this impassioned article, he urges educators to rethink what it means to…

Educators often encourage students to take risks and work hard to achieve well in school--an approach called "academic press." An assumption behind this approach is that students trust educators enough to take risks and embrace academic challenge; but when a safe, trustworthy environment isn't in place, students won't take risks and may…

Realizing their coaching program was not having desired effects for teachers or for students' achievement, leaders in the Manor School District in Texas revamped the district's coaching program. They created two "communities" encompassing all coaches in the district (since district schools were each doing their own thing with regard to…

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…

Educators at a turnaround school in Boston describe how they built a foundation for achievement gains by building and safeguarding relational trust among staff. The school, Henry Grew Elementary, focused in particular on fostering educators' readiness to trust, clarifying roles, and solidifying routines to support connection and risk-taking.

"The only important thing about feedback is what students do with it," declares Dylan Wiliam in this article. The standard school procedure (in which a teacher looks at a piece of student work and writes something on it, and the student later looks at what the teacher has written) does not necessarily increase student learning. Teachers…

Imagine getting on the tandem bike of co-teaching. You have a lot to decide. Who sits in the front and takes the lead? Who takes the backseat? The fact is, neither classroom teachers nor secondary content-area teachers have proven eager to give up leading their lesson when they have a co-teacher present, whether to support ELLs or students with…