School leaders' resilience is best built as a collective effort, write Soraya Sablo Sutton and Nate Gong. The "Change Makers" program at UC Berkeley's Principal Leadership Institute gave school leaders across California the opportunity to work together to solve problems of practice and build their collective resilience--a key to…

School leaders often neglect a key mechanism for empowerment: The school-improvement plan. In this article, researchers Coby Meyers and Bryan VanGronigen discuss five fundamentals of improvement planning that school leaders can use to ensure their plans are useful, effective, and on-track.

While schools' official vision statements--statements school leaders write telling their own deep vision for what they want their school to be--generally aren't empowering, they could be. A well-crafted vision statement is a powerful tool because it articulates the promise a leader and school staff make to students and provides focus. Drawing on…

A school's success is largely determined by the effectiveness of its principal--decades of research have made this clear. Less settled is the question of what principals need to know and do to drive positive outcomes in their schools. A recent report funded by The Wallace Foundation provides evidence on the connection between school principals and…

Discussing school leadership in the absence of race is like building a house absent a foundation. While that house may stay upright for some time, it will be ill-prepared to withstand the strong winds of change. This is why Mark Gooden fervently recommends that every school principal, no matter their color or background, writes a racial…

Leaders have three classic responses to discord. Authors Robert Feirsen and Seth Weitzman call them the 3 "A's"--avoidance, attack, and addressing. They make the case that the third one--addressing conflict--is the healthiest way for leaders to solve problems and promote a positive school culture.

Learning to process feedback wisely is essential to school improvement--and personal growth, writes school principal Sanée Bell. Here, Bell shares hard-won tips for soliciting authentic feedback from staff and, even more important, for organizing, acting on, and reflecting on that feedback.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy to come from COVID-related distance learning would be "not" learning from this experience to improve teaching when teachers and students physically return to classrooms. A robust discussion of the evidence of success during this pandemic school could be a major boost to the process of teaching and learning.…

Some bad ideas never seem to die, despite research showing they do not actually work. It can be hard to spot them at first. Those dispelled education theories that research shot down long ago. They creep up in studies, shuffling around mumbling in the reference lists, or moan loudly in blog posts. The author often stumbles across these…

In a candid conversation, two preeminent education researchers discuss the state of the field and their own methodological differences. Matthew A. Kraft, an influential education scholar and former K-12 teacher, talks with John Hattie, renowned author of Visible Learning. They debate their different viewpoints on effect sizes, discuss how evidence…

Teachers are frequently told to use "research-based strategies." At the same time, they face unreasonable workloads, with inadequate time and resources to engage with the research and evaluate it themselves. In the same professional development workshops that elevate the importance of research, teachers are also told to focus on…

The world of research has much knowledge to benefit practitioners, but it can be hard for practitioners to know where and how to sift through the research base to find the most relevant information for their needs. By translating problems of practice into the narrower types of questions that research can answer, educators can locate relevant…

Teacher-research clubs are an effective and infectious way to solve problems and fuel passion. Educators Sally Donnelly and Megan McCormick discuss how their do-it-yourself teacher research club helped their colleagues gain perspective on problems of practice and grew to be an influential part of their school district.

To achieve equity, besides identifying problems with student achievement that need to be surmounted, educators must perceive themselves to be capable of meeting all students' learning needs--they must have collective efficacy. Learn five key practices a school leader can take to build staff collective efficacy by fostering deep reflection. When…

"There are no shortcuts for true equity," says authors and consultants Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Equity work is hard, on-going work--and it means not falling into ineffective traps and tropes. Find out what these traps are and how to avoid them.