Getting Smart

Do you ever wonder what your co-workers really think about you? What are the assumptions they make about your beliefs, habits, and personal life? Do they understand what your job is and all the things you do to accomplish the tasks assigned to you? When I worked at the Buck Institute for Education I had a colleague who openly referred to me as her work spouse. There was never any romantic interest between us. We were both happily married. But we traveled so often together that she became c

By: Jon Alfuth Kathleen Farley from Google recently wrote about what it would mean to shift from traditional credit hours in K-12 education to skills-first standards. I’ve long thought a shift like this is needed and necessary. But, in my years of work around personalized, competency-based education policy, I continue to see such efforts run into a persistent and steadfast roadblock: college admissions requirements. Without a substantial shift in college admissions requirements, widespread ad

Somewhere between here and our summer destination last year, something happened in the back seat of our car. My teenagers, phone-free for the duration of the drive, started talking. At first, it was random observations and inside jokes. Then it became something else. It started with nothing important, then slowly moved toward the things that usually stay hidden beneath a busy week. I sat in the passenger seat, trying not to make it weird by noticing too much. But I noticed.  I tried not

By: Kevin Dahill-Fuchel Children spend only 20 percent of their time in school between kindergarten and 12th grade. One-fifth of the day. Everything educators are asked to accomplish, academic growth, social development, and taught skills for adulthood, has to happen in that narrow window. And children need to be ready to learn. The other 80 percent of the day can’t be boxed up neatly during school hours. Life follows students through the school doors. I’ve worked in New York City

By: Michael Crawford A charter school for opportunity youth in St. Paul. A comprehensive public high school in rural Indiana. A competency-based school in Philadelphia. A design-focused school in suburban Los Angeles. A profession-based program in an Iowa community. These schools share almost nothing on paper: not size, not population, not pedagogy, not zip code. And yet they share a roughly identical architecture for developing durable skills in young people. That was the finding we did n

My former colleague and artful educator, Alcine Mumby, always used to say, “teachers cannot be expected to teach what they don’t know or have never experienced themselves…”, and this has rung true for me in my own experience as well as what I witness in working with educators across the country. The passion and commitment with which educators walk into their buildings each day is unfortunately not always enough when we are asked to regularly adopt new practices, teach new classes, learn new tech

By: Stephen Griffin Imagine it’s 2030. A student enrolls in a supply chain management program at her local community college. Before she registers for her first course, she can see — clearly, in plain language — exactly which competencies she’ll build, how those competencies map to open positions at regional employers, and what her peers who completed the same program are doing now. She isn’t making a $12,000 decision in the dark. She has evidence. Midway through the prog

By: Beth Davis-Dillard The United States is navigating a math crisis. In 2024, only 39% of fourth graders and 28% of eighth graders were proficient in math on the NAEP. While these figures are influenced by multiple socioeconomic and institutional factors, they highlight a persistent tension in American classrooms: a tendency to prioritize speed and correctness over deep conceptual understanding. After decades of reform churn—from rote memorization to the Math Wars—today’s math education land

My favorite part of teaching middle school was the freedom to experiment with instructional design. I scrapped the standard book report and replaced it with a graphic organizer that required students to present the key ideas in a multi-modal response using no more than 100 words. The related oral reports were governed by a two-minute time limit. A student earned bonus credit later if I spotted anyone during SSR reading a book they had recommended. The rule for my project-ending summative e

By: Michael Ham & Beth Holland Recently, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has not been the only major school district to dominate education headlines by announcing a decision to significantly restrict students’ use of laptops and tablets during the school day. Across states and districts, new policies include grade-level limits on screen time, the potential elimination of device use for early learners, and constraints on how digital tools can be used. On the surface, this de

“Learning AI is like learning to ride a bike. How do you teach somebody to balance?” asked Alex Kotran at the 2026 NewSchools Summit.  His answer: “You kind of have to feel it.” And we felt it. This gem came from a vibecoding pre-workshop led by aiEDU. While many of the attendees were familiar with using AI for typical workplace tasks like synthesis and writing support, the call to action at this year’s Summit gave us a necessary push to shift from being informed users of a tool to b

By: Shereen El Mallah, Jenny Poon, and youth authors Alex Mathew, and Adora Olise This year, Ms. Chen started using AI to provide feedback on student writing. It saved her two hours a week and ensured that the last essay in the stack received the same quality of feedback as the first. She vetted every word, but she never told her students. There was no school policy requiring disclosure, and truthfully, she couldn’t quite define where her voice ended and the algorithm’s began. 

Your feed is loaded with glowing reviews of the latest AI-powered teaching tools. They promise to save you time by assessing student work, creating customized curriculum, or writing multilingual parent newsletters. Your students have access to personalized AI tutors, automated writing and editing tools, podcast generators, research assistants, virtual labs and field trips, and multimodal textbooks. The bounty of educational technology is undeniable. There is just one problem. The workflow

By: Dr. Tovah Sheldon Naming different kinds of thinking is not new, and neither is thinking about thinking. Yet, in today’s complex and fast-changing world, the ability to think well matters! It also matters that we are intentionally working to strengthen and expand how we think. Below are eight kinds of thinking, along with brief definitions and prompts to help you reflect on and intentionally grow each one. Strategic Thinking Critical Thinking Systems & Symphonic Thinking

By: Courtney Ochi  In a recent piece by Rebecca Midles, George Philhower of Indiana’s Microschool Collaborative offered a provocation worth sitting with: “Nearly all the rules we play by in education today were made up once. None of these are laws of nature.” Most conversations about redesigning schools focus on schedules, grading, or seat time. These are real constraints-  and important ones. But there’s another set of rules that gets far less attention:

By Trey Lackey, Dr. Caleb Collier, and Dr. Tyler Thigpen from Institute for Self-Directed Learning The standard story about struggling math learners goes something like this: they don’t have enough support. Not enough teachers, not enough time, not enough resources. Fix the access problem, and you fix the learning problem. We spent the last two years testing that story at The Forest School: An Acton Academy in Atlanta, Georgia. What we found should complicate it. Our new study surveyed

By: Andy Szeto Quiet quitting entered the workplace during the pandemic as employees and leaders renegotiated expectations around workload, boundaries, and engagement. Randall S. Peterson (2025) describes leadership-level disengagement as a lack of vision, weak decision-making, and diminished trust. In schools, this pattern has real consequences: when principals disengage, instructional quality declines, staff morale erodes, and students experience inconsistent expectations and outcomes. F

This blog post is the fifth in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate (PoG). Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk. Post 1: Norwalk Public Schools: Levers for Living the Portrait of a Graduate (a 7-part series) Post 2: Norwalk Public Schools: Unpacking the Levers for Deeper PoG Implement

By Danish Kurani  This article is an adapted excerpt from the book The Spaces That Make Us: Why Design Is Broken and How We Can Create a Happier, Healthier World. From the first day of kindergarten to the day students complete high school, they spend approximately fifteen thousand hours in school. The only place they might spend more time during this period is at home, which means schools are one of the most important environments for growth and development. Schools are where children

By: Dr. Tyler Thigpen Across the U.S., professional standards commissions and state agencies are revising what educators should know and be able to do. That’s encouraging. It signals seriousness about quality, learners, and the long-term health of the profession. But there is a gap hiding in plain sight: We are trying to modernize educator preparation without a shared, field-tested picture of what the future educator actually looks like in practice. Without exemplars, standards work becomes g