In "Finding Your Leadership Soul," Carlos Moreno shares his journey from a challenging childhood in the Bronx, to teaching and advising at an innovative high school, to serving as co-executive director for Big Picture Learning, an organization that works to advance equitable, student-centered education. Along the way, he introduces…

Young adults today are the least happy demographic group, departing from a long-established U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age in many countries worldwide. The longstanding U-curve reflects the unhappiness and stress that most people experience in the midlife years as they juggle financial and family constraints while both the…

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, is the nation's leading source for rigorous, independent education research, evaluation, and statistics. IES's National Center for Education Research (NCER) supports rigorous research that addresses the nation's most pressing education needs from early…

Many selective colleges and universities are considering alternate strategies to enroll diverse student bodies following the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions. Developing high-quality online courses for college credit, and offering them to students at lower-income high schools in a hybrid format, has the potential to…

On the surface, this trickle-down view of educational change--what T. Nichols calls "innovation-from-above"--makes sense. Teachers learn about new devices, apps, teaching techniques, and leadership strategies as they show up in articles, reports, and other professional resources, or after they have already been implemented elsewhere.…

Middle and high school students are part of Generation Z (birth years 1997-2012), a group that is emerging as very different from their parents and teachers. This article considers ways that generational research about Generation Z learners and NCTM's Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices can be used to inform and innovate practice in the…

Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut, has made student voice and leadership not only a philosophy, but a universal principle. The single-site charter school sits on 20 acres of land and houses an urban farm that produces more than 10,000 pounds of local food each year. Students are encouraged to become local changemakers by serving…

As schools across the country continue to search for innovative practices to address pandemic-related learning loss and combat social isolation, experts are pointing to high dosage tutoring as a strategy worthy of consideration. Great Oaks Charter School Bridgeport in Connecticut offers an example of a high dosage tutoring model that has been…

Like every school across the country, Holyoke High School, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, struggled during remote learning: Teachers had to adjust to new technologies, and many students felt disconnected from the school environment. Despite these pandemic-induced challenges, Holyoke school leaders and staff kept student engagement at the forefront of…

The Barr Foundation's Engage New England (ENE) initiative was an effort to catalyze high school innovation by developing exemplary schools that support the success of students who are off track to graduate. Grounded in the tenets of positive youth development, the ENE initiative provided grants and technical assistance to support new or redesigned…

Connecting physics with the humanities is a fascinating challenge and a complicated cultural task. Yet, it is exactly what the Italian secondary-school graduation exam requires in its oral part. Although it has been criticized by teachers and students, here I provide a list of real school life examples and discuss why this can be a great,…

Multilingual learners (MLs), also referred to as English learners (ELs) in US K-12 public schools, and specifically newcomer MLs who have been in US schools for 2 years or less, are expected to learn the English language and reach grade level standards as their monolingual English-speaking peers. Mathematics education in the US has struggled over…

This paper has two goals: First, to detail processes through which a project funded under a National Science Foundation workforce development program (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers, ITEST) leveraged active partnerships among government agencies, industry firms, and universities to develop and study an innovative,…

High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

The team at Nokomis Regional High School in Newport, Maine, has spent over a decade laying the groundwork for multifaceted reforms--including interdisciplinary curriculum, project-based learning, education outside of the classroom walls, and meaningful career exploration--all of which are student-centered and aim to deepen rigorous academics into…