In a single moment, all 26 kids in that class learned three important things: 1) No matter how foolish your answer is, you will not be ridiculed in this class; 2) All of my students are equally important to me; and 3) While I want to have a close relationship with you, it will never be at the expense of another student.

"Do you prefer to work alone or with a partner?"

If I notice that the dynamics are off in a particular class, I will schedule an activity that does not require much guidance from me just so that I can use the time to reconnect.

Mr. Nadelstern recently wrote a paper for the University of Washington center on how New York created networks of autonomous schools. He said rather than fight the heterogeneous practices taking place behind closed doors at schools, central-office administrators should embrace them. "The people closest to the kids in the classroom—the principal, the teachers in consultation with parents—are the best people to make decisions," he said.

"It's a value for us not to get caught up in one school type as being preferable to another," she said. "We try to focus not on the differences between these schools but the similar goals."

Teaching is a professional craft. Thinking that any high-scoring college student could come in and excel demeans it as a profession. No one would consider letting smart English majors perform surgery on low-income patients, or allowing cum laude math majors to do legal work for poor clients.

Stuffing under-prepared rookies’ ears with confidence and sending them into the fray doesn’t have a net neutral impact on our students or our national conversation on education.

We need to tear apart the school day, the high school timetable, the school year, the four-year diploma. We need to rethink credit- and diploma-awarding authority, which need not be the sole purview of the high school.

most schools are designed and operated to penalize failure. Yet unless students are allowed to fail, they can't learn.

young innovators are intrinsically motivated.

Reformers can't have it both ways. If they want schools to develop the next Steve Jobs or J.J. Rowling, they have to let go of their obsession with test scores as indispensable evidence of quality education

In the World is Flat by Thomas Friedman he said, "Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait." In the book Out of Our Minds by Sir Ken Robinson, he writes, "Rebuilding the communities that have been left bereft by the recession will depend on imagination, creativity and innovation."

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.