Teacher residency programs (modeled after the clinical residency model in medical training) show great promise in helping local school systems build a highly capable and diverse teaching workforce. Jointly run by districts and nearby universities, these programs recruit teaching candidates, pair them with carefully selected mentor teachers, and…

Providing students with choice can be a powerful means of supporting student engagement. However, not all choice opportunities lead to improved student engagement. Teachers can increase the likelihood that students will value choice by analyzing how students associate feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with the choice provided them.…

District administrators who want to build capacity for data use in schools may be well-served by starting in the central office. This case study of the Boston Public Schools shows how central office administrators can leverage their own data inquiry cycles to improve the ways they support schools in using data. Using the Data Wise Improvement…

The author reframes the concept of motivation through the observation of a student who is a recent immigrant and seems unmotivated because he is not doing well in his classes. Instead of a lack of motivation by the student, the author finds the system failing to engage the student by enacting four conditions of a motivational framework:…

Early college high school models are designed to encourage and assist traditionally underrepresented groups of students- low income, Latino, and African-American- to persist in and graduate from high school while earning college credit. Some of the models target high school dropouts, with the aim of helping them acquire the education and training…