How deeply principals should know content areas and how much it matters for helping their teachers is an active debate.

Do your teachers trust you? Do your teachers think you have the skills to help them get better at instruction? Do they know that if a parent complains about them, you will handle the situation fairly? Are you and your teachers on the same page when it comes to student discipline?

Art has often been relegated as an additional activity in schools. But schools that put art at the center of a child's learning experience through arts integration are seeing kids thrive.

Pia Brännkärr är doktorand vid Finlands svenskspråkiga universitet, Åbo Akademi i Vasa. Pia arbetar parallellt som universitetslärare i textilslöjd vid Åbo Akademi och är sedan juni 2019 nyantagen doktorand i doktorandprogrammet i pedagogiska vetenskaper: slöjdvetenskap.

Education researchers are considering how to predict when a given assignment will generate the optimal amount of persistence in a student. At issue, researchers say, is that there are different types of persistence, including "productive persistence" and "wheel-spinning."

Childhood — and parenting — have radically changed in the past few decades, to the point where far more children today struggle to manage their behavior. That's the argument Katherine Reynolds Lewis makes in her new parenting book, The Good News About Bad Behavior.

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.