Research shows that personal connections and interests are vital to the resilience of at-risk children (Polakow, 1993). We know that attachments in early childhood, especially between birth and age three, matter a great deal. Even in the face of incredible hardship, parents or other mentors can successfully ease these troubles. Teachers can have…

Pat Yongpradit is the director of education at Code.org. He leads all education efforts, including professional development and curriculum creation, and he builds relationships with school districts. Pat joined "Educational Horizons" to talk about why it is important to teach computer science--even for non-computer science teachers. This…

It's the season for the job hunt, whether one is looking for their first job or taking the next step along their career path. This article presents first-person accounts to see how teachers balance the rewards and challenges of working in different types of schools. Tamica Lewis, a third-grade teacher, states that faculty at her school is…

The author of this article, a middle school science teacher, reflects on her teaching profession and how she connected to other teachers which helped fuel her students' love of learning. She describes her traditional teaching practice and the facilities of her school's middle science laboratory facilities. She explains how social media…

Alfie Kohn (http://www.alfiekohn.org) writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. "Time" described him as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores." He is the author of 12 books, including "The Schools Our Children Deserve, The Case…

In a school of 1,000 students, up to 100 will be gay, lesbian, or bisexual; 10 will be transgender; and one will be intersex (biologically neither male nor female). If their lives are average, 87 of them will be verbally harassed, 40 of them will be physically harassed, and 19 will be physically assaulted in the next year because of their sexual…

Twenty-one students were homeless. One student had asked a cafeteria worker on a Friday afternoon for leftover food to take home for the weekend. Those were among the facts that high school English teacher Ann Haugland heard at a professional development event in her Boone, Iowa, Community School District. "I couldn't sleep that night," Haugland…

This paper presents a conversation with Carol Dweck, the author of "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Random House, 2006). She serves as the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science and is the recipient of…

The author's first teaching position was as a 4th and 5th grade teacher at a school in Philadelphia. There, she learned the Quaker value of adding silence and periods of reflection to her teaching to provide a wider range of students with the opportunity to participate in classroom discussions. Later, a focus on silence as a teaching strategy led…

One has heard about personal learning networks (PLNs), but what are they and how are they different than professional learning communities (PLCs)? Find out how PLNs can help a teacher pursue his/her own professional interests and be a better teacher. This article answers questions related to PLNs such as: (1) What are personal learning networks?;…

One of the most important things that teachers do is to provide feedback to students. It's possible to have wonderful curricula, engaging lesson plans, and high expectations, but when a feedback is ineffective, students don't understand how to translate curricula and lessons into improved academic performance. For a student, grades are very…

Today's adolescents write to communicate--via text messaging, instant messaging, and social networking posts. They are skilled at manipulating their out-of-school digital language to communicate with an intended audience and to capture individual voice. Because the writing is informal, teens have the ability to break rules, and they can do so…

The author's classroom is bare, and the school supplies she received are long gone. After realizing how much money she was spending on her classroom each year, she decided to find other resources besides her credit card to stock up her classroom. In this article, the author shares some strategies that provided more return with a lower investment.

Learners who have struggled along the way can provide many lessons for everyone and for schools that are supposed to help all students learn. Based on interviews with hundreds of "great learners," the author identifies seven characteristics that describe what sets great learners apart from other learners. These are: (1) Great learners see learning…

Building a strong partnership with students' families will help the student succeed. At Parents for Public Schools, the author and her staff work to bring parents and guardians into a positive relationship with their children's teachers and schools, and they have gathered feedback from parents about how they think that can happen. This article…