When professional learning is interdependent, a teacher's individual success hinges on the efforts of the entire team. Leadership experts Jenni Donohoo and Ann Mausbach explain why that's a good thing.

High school science teacher Michelle Vanhala reflects on her (sometimes rocky) path to standards-based grading and a grading system that aligned with her educational philosophy.

It's time for educators to ditch deficit-based thinking and instead focus on the strengths of immigrant students, writes Jessica Lander. Here, she provides several concrete strategies teachers and schools can use to honor immigrant students' assets, while still providing rigorous English language instruction. For example, teachers can set high…

Pared down standards, according to ASCD author Mike Schmoker, are the cure to the Common Core. In this provocative article, Schmoker describes how the Common Core literacy standards have largely been a "disaster"--their tangled implementation "an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae." To "right the ship of…

In many countries, just as in the United States, the pressure is on to raise the quality of the teaching force; the bar is being raised for what teachers should be able to do. Drawing on her experiences organizing the International Summit on the Teaching Profession and leading delegations of educators to various nations, Stewart describes how some…

For many educators, personalization and standardization are considered antithetical, with personalization implying learning that is unique to each student and standardization implying something common to all. We must get past this dichotomy, France argues. Comparing methods in education to those in social media, he says that by standardizing…

Teachers take seriously that "teaching is a deeply human enterprise," yet they can be candidates of worry about standards (or, perhaps more accurately, standardized tests) and where it's taking them in terms of curriculum design. If in their planning they crank out lessons solely focused on goals that young people don't care much about,…

When faced with students who have learning skills, styles, and backgrounds very different from their own, teachers can promote academic rigor by engaging in reality pedagogy. This approach proposes seven strategies, or Cs: Cogenerative dialogues (in which teachers solicit feedback from a dissimilar group of students); coteaching (in which students…