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he Denver Plan outlines the following goals: Ensuring that all children learn from a highly skilled faculty in every school that is empowered by robust professional development and timely assessment data; Highly trained principals and assistant principals who will serve as instructional leaders of the faculty in DPS schools; and Collaboration among the Denver community and all DPS stakeholders who will support all children in a safe, orderly, and enriching environment in every school

Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about I realize there are people whose impulse is to sneer when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as “soft” or “faddish” anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between feeling and thinking, between a child’s comfort level and his or her capacity to learn. Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As one group of researchers put it, “In order to promote students’ academic performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and emotional adjustment.” And yet, broadly speaking, we don’t. Teachers and schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures (which, to make matters worse, mostly consist of standardized test scores). If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a “good school” would sound very different. Likewise, our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside-out, seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about -- or even bullied -- by adults.

Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.

Responding to student data in real-time is a paradigm shift for today’s teachers and a rich area of exploration for training and development.

Relationships will evolve as students spend less time in large impersonal classes and more time in small, personalized groups where they can have higher-quality interactions with adults.

They will help create learning playlists and/or learning paths