Color. Carpets. Configurations. The classroom can create a sense of safety, calm, and invitation to learn if designed correctly. Authors and educators Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Dominique Smith describe their journey to making their school's classrooms trauma-informed and safe, inviting spaces for students.

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…

We explore the use of iPads in a diverse urban high school and the ways in which teachers and students were supported to integrate these tools into their instruction. We provided 4 English teachers with 20 iPads with little or no professional development about how to integrate them into their instruction. Using a formative experiment design, we…

This study focuses on district leadership designed to improve student achievement. We employed a formative experiment design methodology, a type of design study, to investigate the leadership efforts to improve student and teacher learning. The findings suggest that leadership through professional development and an instructional framework led to…

In this exploration of school improvement work, two teachers at two schools worked hard to improve literacy achievement, but the performance at only one of the schools resulted in significant growth. By spending time observing classrooms and interacting with students, the authors believe that two factors made the difference: school structures and…