A majority of students in career and technical education teacher academies indicate that they do not want to be educators. Recognizing this, Skyline High School propelled its teacher academy program in a new direction and redesigned it in a way that is mutually beneficial to the teacher academy students, preK-12 learners, and the education…

Although most teachers are familiar with growth mindsets, many conflate it with other terms or concepts or have difficulties understanding how to best foster growth mindsets in their students. Shelby Clark and Madora Soutter describe how growth mindsets are related to, yet distinct from, intellectual risk-taking and share strategies for fostering…

Despite significant societal changes, the high school experience hasn't changed much in recent decades. Joshua P. Starr reflects on his own high school experiences and that of his son and considers how schools might change their focus away from requiring students to learn specific facts and toward having them develop skills as they engage in rich…

The capacity to navigate conflict and solve problems will persist as an essential skill of the future, even if today's students will be doing jobs that haven't been invented yet. What are we doing in schools right now to ensure students have these skills? For nearly a decade, a program called Speak Truth has taught students to use their voices,…

In their recent book "In Search of Deeper Learning" (Harvard University Press, 2019), scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine argue that if high schools are to help adolescents flourish as individuals and members of a community, they must do more than teach them academic skills and content -- they must also give them meaningful opportunities…

Comal County, Texas, may be rural but its students face many of the same challenges as students in urban districts. Communities In Schools of South Central Texas works with the local school district to identify student needs and provide critical supports to help young people prepare for life after high school.

Results on the National Assessment for Education Progress and the Program for International Student Assessment show that high school mathematics instruction is past due for a redesign. Despite calls for reform going back at least four decades, the structure of math instruction has remained largely the same. In April 2018, the National Council of…

There is substantial evidence on the effectiveness of many forms of advanced education, especially various approaches to acceleration, ability grouping, and curricular innovations such as structured curriculum and enrichment. Nonetheless, additional research on the ways in which advanced education impacts the learning and lives of students across…

One of the most powerful ways to boost the payoff from school sports lays in helping coaches build developmental relationships with student-athletes. Developmental relationships are close connections through which young people develop character skills to discover who they are, gain the ability to shape their own lives, and learn how to interact…

Sports participation in high school has positive effects on students' later civic engagement. But that is true of nearly all forms of extracurricular participation in high school--whether a group is explicitly civic (student government or a service club) or far removed from civic life (an academic club or a music group). Indeed, the civic…

Increasingly, policy makers, educators, and school systems are embracing LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in the classroom. This fall, California's K-12 classrooms began using LGBTQ-inclusive textbooks, and, for the last three years, a San Francisco high school has offered an LGBTQ Studies course, likely the first in the country and a pilot for…

Educating high school students for both college and career is difficult. Teaching trade skills seems alien to the academic culture. But new research indicates that soft skills are quite important to judgments of employability and that youth learn many soft skills in traditional academic subjects (e.g., literature). A focus on soft skills allows…

Educators Rising, an initiative of PDK International, has developed five microcredentials that allow aspiring teachers to demonstrate what they know and are able to do through experiences very similar to what professional teachers do every day. [This article contains a sidebar: "Microcredentials in the Teacher Academy Classroom: Rigor,…

New York City's Department of Education offers a course called Digital Literacies, in which overage and undercredited high school students in more than 60 schools develop key skills needed for life after high school, whether it entails further education, employment, or, more commonly, both. With a "blended learning" design, it is more…

In order to accommodate the education needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, American schools need to do more than add LGBT information to the curriculum in sex education class. If we believe, as Erikson (1968) suggested--that adolescence is the time when young people try to make sense of who they are--and if we believe that…