Coach and ASCD author Cathy Toll knows that principals can face resistance and competing priorities when trying to make changes in schools. "Whole-staff coaching" is one tool to get all educators on the same page by putting teachers in control of planning, implementing, and evaluating change--and principals in charge of facilitating it.

Author and education nonprofit leader Lynne Munson recounts how she helped steer an ambitious curriculum development initiative that worked directly in concert with teachers. More than a decade later, district leaders have learned much more about how coherent, classroom-tested, and teacher-supported curricula can transform student learning. With…

When classroom observations are grounded in curiosity, they're more likely to give teachers the feedback they need--and want, write Sean Conner and Jennifer Froehle. Thoughtful questioning (over telling and directing) prompts teachers to construct their own understanding of strengths, needs, and next steps.

To build collective teacher efficacy, teams must agree to (constructively) disagree, say assistant superintendent B.C. Preston and educator-author Jenni Donohoo. Leaders who mindfully organize team actions, alongside the team itself, empower teachers through processes and protocols to confront ineffective instruction and assessment practices--and…

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 authors argue that, amid the stresses of their jobs, educators are expected to continuously "recharge for survival" rather than being given opportunities for authentic recovery. To make teaching jobs more sustainable, they write, schools need to rethink the way they conceive of time, space, and connection, and attend to the…

Riley asserts that some findings of cognitive science conflict with key principles of personalized learning--that students should control the content of their learning and that they should control the pace of their learning. A personalized approach is in conflict with the cognitive science principle that committing key facts in a discipline to…

Both speaking and listening are essential to effective communication. Unfortunately, meaningful two-way exchanges are largely absent from conversations about improving professional practice. Instead, many teachers say that they feel the observation and evaluation process is something that is done "to" them--at the post-observation…

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…

If your professional learning seems stalled, maybe you could put yourself and your colleagues in the driver's seat of professional development. The authors describe a professional learning approach that gives teachers both a say in what they focus their learning on and a chance to practice and refine teaching strategies that they hope to…

For those who believe in the promise of public education, here's an antidote to the many negative messages that educators have been receiving. In doing research for her new book, "Why Teachers Teach Now" (Teachers College Press, 2014), Sonia Nieto contacted teacher educators from across the United States and asked each to nominate a…

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…

"It's always been a promising time for teacher leadership. It's just never been a successful time," writes noted educator Roland Barth. Why? Barth points to five obstacles: administrator resistance, the taboo in teaching against elevating oneself higher than one's peers, the fact that teachers' plates are full, the…

Like high-stakes student assessment, high-stakes teacher evaluation threatens to be an occasional event that is disconnected from day-to-day teaching and learning, producing results that do not help teachers improve their performance and placing teachers in a passive role as recipients of external judgment. For several years, the authors have…

Whereas the laissez-faire approach merely tells each teacher to do what he or she thinks best, the principal moving toward empowerment charges a group of teachers with devising the best decision for all. A Maryland elementary school used the Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement staff development plan as a big step toward preparing teachers…