A "culture of safety"—at all levels of a district—is the first and most critical step in dealing with occupational injury. It also guides the prevention of, response to and mitigation of hazards in the workplace, including staff behavior. Students arrive in three days. A staff meeting starts in five minutes. A teacher wants to hang […]
Principals shifting their roles from building manager to instructional leader need more extensive PD to ensure top performance from teachers and students, according to a new policy brief from ASCD. Race to the Top's requirements linking teacher evaluations to student test scores is largely responsible for the change in the principal's responsibilities, says Susan Race, […]
Close reading is a popular term today in elementary literacy classrooms and a requirement in the Common Core ELA standards in order to ensure students are college- and career- ready. It enables students to independently comprehend increasingly challenging texts. Students need to develop the habits of mind and the skills necessary to unpack the deep, […]
Alton L. Frailey, superintendent of Katy ISD in Texas and president of the Texas Association of School Administrators, was elected 2015-16 president-elect of AASA, and will begin his post in July. Frailey became Katy ISD chief in 2007, after previously serving as chief of DeSoto ISD in Texas and Cincinnati Public Schools. "AASA champions the […]
While blended learning has become a common topic of discussion and an increasingly common district-level strategy for driving student achievement, strategies for successfully making the transition to this new model of learning are often ignored. In this web seminar, originally broadcast on March 17, 2015, presenters explored best practices and lessons learned from blended learning […]
Meriden, Connecticut, is a struggling, former industrial city, once known for its silver manufacturing, lamp producers, military product development, and automotive component assembly plants. We were both born there, to parents who had little more than each other and a dream for their children. We were poor. We were the statistic. Yet, just as we […]
When the District of Columbia Public Schools' Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced in 2012 the launch of an ambitious plan to transform our schools, we were all very excited, albeit a little nervous. But the plan to invest in struggling schools, and focus significant resources and attention to raise proficiency rates across the district, made our […]
Teach students math procedures if you want them to solve equations. Instill a deep conceptual understanding of mathematics and get them thinking like mathematicians, and you've prepared your students to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That's a message presenters will send at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference, which will be […]
Vision: The First Critical Step in Developing a Strategy for Educational Technology Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Authors Darryl Vidal and Michael Casey provide administrators with a structured methodology for developing an educational technology vision that benefits all stakeholders and supports school and district strategic plans. This book discusses technology in a non-technical manner, and addresses […]
St. John's Prep is a rigorous, Catholic independent day school for boys in grades 9 through 12. When the school adds a middle school with grades 6, 7, and 8 in September 2015, its 175-acre campus in Danvers, Mass. will serve 1,450 students. Focused on creating an atmosphere that fosters intellectual growth, St. John's Prep […]
