Skills in communication and collaboration can be just as important as content knowledge and technical skills in the workplace. So what are schools doing to foster these skills? English language arts teacher Alexis Wiggins adapted the Socratic seminar model to make it student-led and collaborative. Under her new approach, the Spider Web…

Students whose parents receive regular and personalized messages with actionable information from teachers are more likely to succeed in school. But effective data-sharing programs require more than simply sending data home. They also encourage educators and families to make connections with each other, sharing observations about how a child…

Most English language learners are from families that have recently immigrated to the United States-and many of those families traveled here at tremendous risk to seek better education for their children. It's important for classroom teachers to make building relationships with the families of ELLs a priority. Breiseth asserts that the most…

"One of the most powerful educational tools available to students and teachers lies hidden in plain sight, in every classroom--conversation," writes Susan Engel. The conversational exchanges that happen naturally between parents and young children are full of questions that can lead to learning. Within the context of these casual…

One popular approach to teacher leadership is to identify certain teachers as particularly successful, then have others learn from them. Collaborative leadership, in contrast, looks at leadership as a quality that anyone can have. In this model, the goal is not to figure out who is best. Instead, teachers share their unique talents and interests…

Do teacher leaders in your school mainly fill the traditional roles of department chair or grade-level representative? Or do they lead their peers in collaborative teams whose primary focus is improving student learning? Terry Wilhelm, director of the School Leadership Center for Riverside County Office of Education in California, says that…

Sixth grade language arts teacher Julie Ramsay was disheartened at her students' lack of interest in writing, so she began looking at what they were doing online to see if she could bring some of those experiences to the classroom. She saw that students enjoyed having opportunities to share their experiences with an audience and receive…

Most people think of a teacher leader as someone who takes on additional roles outside the classroom. But in this article, Michelle Collay argues that all effective teaching requires leadership. Using examples from classroom teachers with whom she has worked, Collay describes four dimensions of powerful classroom-based leadership: (1) teaching…

Stephanie Smith understands why parents in the urban area where she teaches balk when she calls to ask if she can visit them at home to talk about their child and meet the family. Her family would've balked too when Smith was in elementary school. "The abyss between the school's bright lights and the government housing I grew up in…

For the 12 years that Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, the Big Apple was home to the nation's largest experiment in implementing the business model of education reform. The numbers of public school closings and new charter schools soared, while the high school student assignment system was overhauled to be driven by choice. By the…

In a study of highly innovative young people in their 20s, the author found that although many people in the millennial generation want to do meaningful work and make a difference in the world, conventional high schools and colleges are not preparing their graduates to be innovators and entrepreneurs. This is a serious problem, he asserts, because…

Critics claim that digital technologies are killing reading, but these teacher-librarians have observed that teens are as excited about reading as they ever were. Online communities give these readers opportunities to get to know authors, communicate with other fans, and learn more about books of interest. Publishers and authors are responding to…

More than one-half of all institutions of higher education are located within or just outside urban areas. These colleges and university can offer rich resources to provide stability to a city and to improve the quality of life and learning in their communities and schools. The authors describe the university-assisted community schools model that…

Charter schools--what was their original promise? They would enroll diverse groups of students. They would give teachers the room and power to innovate. They would be educational laboratories that would find new ways to reach students, and they would share those lessons with other public schools. But charter schools haven't lived up to their…

These days, everyone seems to be wringing their hands about how to construct new evaluation systems that will make teachers better. This unnecessary angst has led to crazy experiments in reform that have embraced churn for the sake of churn, put school districts at risk, and demoralized many of the most talented teachers. A few school districts,…