The story of students' lives in schools is frequently related through the reductive prism of educational bureaucracy. Students are often narrowly defined by IQ scores, standardized test results, ability groupings, and the like. Such measures are more interested in sorting students into types than in fostering students' growth as unique human…

Why do I do that to myself? As a secondary English teacher, I want desperately for my students to pursue their own interests in their writing, but then I am stuck negotiating topics that push the envelope (read: make me uncomfortable): suicide attempts, cutting, abusive boyfriends, and drug use. When a student noted on his submission that it had…

The author discusses how the many manifestations of blame impact the climate of every school. Blame is a destructive and much overlooked process that prevents educators from helping schools flourish. The author has uncovered how much they are distracted from creating optimal teaching/learning environments due to the strong hold blame has on all…

This article describes one teacher's efforts at creating a differentiated mathematics program in her multi-age first- and second-grade classroom. The author describes challenges encountered and successes met in this process, as well as the structures she uses to meet a variety of student abilities, including open-ended problem-solving tasks,…

This article encourages schools to invite an outside visitor who can provide a common experience for faculty, administration, students, and parents. Through objective observation, the visitor can provide thought-provoking and inspirational feedback on the life of the school. School visitors have affected my classroom life and the daily life of the…

In an election season, the discussion of politics in the classroom can become a minefield of potential disasters for students and teachers alike both in relation to the material being discussed and the social, emotional, and overall identity development of the students. Through a concentrated effort involving curricular activities as well as…

Urban teachers are fleeing urban schools in large numbers for positions that offer safety, support, security, autonomy, respect, higher pay, and freedom from managing disruptive student behaviors and attitudes that are products of the community's social problems. Efforts to retain experienced teachers in urban districts are crucial to the success…

School climate refers to the character and quality of school life. It is based on these patterns and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching, learning, leadership practices, and organizational structures. School climate is at the nexus of individual and group experience. School climate is based on the individual's…

Understanding people and school communities is complex. Facilitating helpful and meaningful change--at an individual or school-wide level--is challenging. As a clinician-educator and a socially and emotionally informed educator, we describe what we do and do not understand about School ABC. We suggest that at the school and individual levels,…

This article describes a psychoanalytic consultation model to an independent grade 7-12 school that offers a practical and efficient approach to improve school climate. This model may stand alone or complement other approaches, and it can be implemented in both independent and public school settings. It focuses not only on "at risk" students,…

Distinguishing between problems that have solutions and dilemmas that need to be managed, the authors identify three overarching questions from the School ABC case that center around data and perceptions. Because the ability to talk openly and honestly about difficult issues is critical to the health of a school, the authors consider the obstacles…

The organization of a school can best be understood as a loosely coupled set of overlapping systems: the student system concerned with student education and development, the faculty system concerned with maintaining professional standards and effective teaching, the parent system focused on the relationship between the school and the child, and…

Schools, like narratives, are massively complex human inventions. Therefore, attempts to evaluate schools must have the capacity to encompass such complexity. Current methods of evaluation are purposely simple, obscuring the hidden and pernicious costs of such comprehensibility. Through a highly subjective telling of his own school's history, the…

In the current climate of high stakes testing and tough love rhetoric, many educational stakeholders have become increasingly reliant on standardized test scores to determine whether or not individual students, teachers, and schools--and even entire districts and states--are successful. In contrast to the black and white picture that test-driven…

"Finding True North" tells the story of two remarkable schools in Rochester, New York. World of Inquiry School 58 and Genesee Community Charter School are successful on every traditional measure, with some of the highest test scores in New York State, and a host of awards and honors between them. What's different about these schools,…