Alexandria Public Schools leaders re-envisioned classrooms a few years ago when planning a new high school at their central Minnesota district. The educators were driven, in part, by students who refused to enroll in industry skills courses taught typically in classrooms tucked away in dark basements. District leaders also hoped to change the stereotype that […]

The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups Viking Children come into the world hardwired to learn in virtually any setting and about any matter. Yet in today’s preschool and kindergarten classrooms, learning has been reduced to scripted lessons and suspect metrics that too often undervalue a child’s intelligence while overtaxing the […]

Teaching research skills once meant asking students to turn stacks of library books into essays on the poetry of Emily Dickinson or the causes of the Civil War. But today, it’s just as likely to mean asking second-graders to design a museum exhibit on the physics of flight, encouraging a 10th-grader to make the case […]

In my 10 years of teaching the ninth grade, I have struggled with a certain category of students—the low performers. These are the students who walk into class on the first day of school expecting to fail. They know nothing about me, but I represent every adult who has ever failed them in the past. […]