Empathy is eroding, says Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. The average American in 2009 was 30 percent less empathetic than their counterpart thirty years before. But there are ways to strengthen our empathy despite deep divisions in the world today.

Many schools face the challenge of how to cover for absent teachers. One city's solution gave its teachers-in-training a supported pathway to the classroom.

Students at a California high school during class are storing their phones in special pouches designed to help limit digital distractions. Teachers say the method, implemented this year, limits their policing of classroom phone use.

Paraprofessionals at P.S. 111 in Long Island City, N.Y., are being trained to teach reading as part of the school's efforts to increase literacy rates. The school, which serves many students from low-income and minority families, works with the nonprofit Literacy Trust to offer training to teacher's aides and other support personnel.

The act of teaching is complex and evolving. Just as farmers apply proper strategies to adapt to the seasons' different conditions, teachers can find ways to work smarter from the first year in the classroom to the last.

What is Sustained Silent Reading, and how is it different from regular silent reading?

Digital tools that students use for learning also can provide some of their biggest distractions. In this commentary, author Ana Homayoun shares how to help students manage these digital distractions by supporting their intrinsic motivation to make better decisions -- online and in the real world.

Students in middle school are amid one of the most trying times of their lives, and school can help or hurt -- or do both. Principals, teachers and other experts advise adults to embrace the messiness inherent in middle school; take preteens' physical needs into account for scheduling and mealtimes; find ways to promote socializing;…

Teachers and researchers agree that homework in elementary school doesn't correlate to better academic achievement. In the older grades, the research is mixed, but cognitive science offers ideas for how to make any homework you assign more effective.

A two-year study by the University of California at Irvine seeks to create tools to maximize student achievement and help them graduate. Researchers will study how students use social media, school technology and support resources, and how attendance affects critical-thinking skills.

A large number of education-technology licenses are never used, and about 98% are not used intensively, according to a report by BrightBytes - findings backed by a separate study from Glimpse K12 that found 67% of educational software product licenses go unused. One potential cause is that edtech purchases are not aligned with the needs…