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"While individual efforts are valuable, students can learn the skills of collaborating on civic issues by working together as a whole class. Here are the five broad steps they should follow: Identify issues important in their lives and community, and decide on one to address. Research the chosen issue and decide how to change or improve the situation. Plan an action, including determining a goal for change; identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change; and deciding how to approach that person or those people. Carry out the action through letters, talks, meetings with officials, policy proposals, and activities, depending on the specific goals of the project. Reflect on the effort when it is over in order to understand their successes, challenges, and ways to continue learning in the future. Two features are especially crucial to making the experience authentic and empowering. First, students must own the key choices and decisions and figure out solutions to problems themselves, so they discover that they can do this. The teacher facilitates the work, of course, but leaves as much of the decision-making as possible to the students. Second, the work should culminate in some action focused on change in the school or community. It's not enough to just talk about change, practice mock legislatures, or serve in a soup kitchen (as valuable as these activities may be). Only when students see adults listening to them with respect, do they realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world. Their efforts may not always succeed, but in being heard they come to value the studying, reading, writing and planning that they have done."

"In this lesson, we explore ethical dilemmas that face normal people around the world, in all walks of life. Some of their cases are familiar, while others are obscure. But they hold one thing in common: They feature individuals who followed the guidance of their own moral code, often risking personal injury or community censure to do so. We'll ask students to examine the underlying characteristics of such episodes, and consider whether some acts are more deserving of support than others."

We grown-ups often assume that children are oblivious to our money talk, ignorant of our budget woes and uninterested in how adults make financial decisions. Better to protect them from all that for as long as possible, right? But the best entries of this year's crop of college application essays about money prove that they are watching and listening - always - and picking up every little thing by osmosis."

"The one thing that generates the juice - the electricity - that brings everything in a story to life, giving it meaning, conflict and urgency, is this: a clear sense of how what's happening in the plot is affecting the protagonist internally. The story, I realized, is not about the plot. The story is about how the things that happen in the plot force the protagonist to struggle with an unavoidable problem, thus triggering - scene-by-scene - a long needed, incredibly hard internal change. What hooks and holds the reader is internal conflict, not external "drama." Recent advances in brain science and evolutionary biology have born this out. Stories are simulations - think of them as the world's first virtual reality: you are there, viscerally experiencing what the protagonist is going through, from the inside out. A story isn't about what someone does, it's about why they do it. Only by diving deep into what someone is really struggling with as they make a hard, unavoidable decision, can we reap useful intel on what it would actually be like to be in that situation ourselves. You're not reading about Jane Eyre's experiences from the outside in, you are Jane Eyre, experiencing those events yourself."

"Unlike most American high schools, student leadership at Harwood Union High School isn't limited to campaigns for cleaner bathrooms or better cafeteria food. Here, teenagers are deeply involved in shaping the pillars of school life, from the daily class schedule to the styles of teaching and learning that work best for them. Aided by community groups that have trained them in leadership techniques, young people and adults at Harwood have forged an unusually strong and equal partnership over the past eight years. They developed decisionmaking processes that put students at the heart of the biggest school decisions. When new teachers are hired, report cards are redesigned, or honors classes are revamped, students are at the table, debating, sharing research, listening, and voting. That work has made this unassuming school in Vermont's Green Mountains a national model for educators who believe students deserve the right to play a central role in creating their school experience."

" I finally took my first tangible steps toward exploring teacher autonomy by applying for an Ignition Grant to attend the Teacher-Powered Schools National Conference in Los Angeles in late January. The grant is for teacher groups who are interested in learning more about the teacher-powered model, which is defined as schools or programs in which teachers have the autonomy to make design and implementation decisions. Long story short: We received the grant and found ourselves immersed in a small sea of like-minded educators-educators who not only envision an educational approach more effective for their students, but have the courage, the heart, and the wisdom to make it a reality. Here are my top five takeaways from the conference."

"The most frequent cliché I hear regarding educational policy is, "We're doing this for the good of the students." We undoubtedly mean that, but the fact that students are not included in district-wide and school-wide decision making essentially excludes them from expressing what they perceive as "for the good of the students." It should be conventional wisdom that including students directly and empowering them to help shape high school and district policy would be educationally beneficial for both schools and students."

A criticism of Massachusetts' decision to adopt national standards that necessitates a move away from classic literature.

What are the traits of an essential question? The question probes a matter of considerable importance. The question requires movement beyond understanding and studying - some kind of action or resolve - pointing toward the settlement of a challenge, the making of a choice or the forming of a decision. The question cannot be answered by a quick and simple "yes" or "no" answer. The question probably endures, shifts and evolves with time and changing conditions - offering a moving target in some respects. The question may be unanswerable in the ultimate sense. The question may frustrate the researcher, may prove arid rather than fertile and may evade the quest for clarity and understanding.

"Two years ago, Zak Malamed and a few friends held their first Twitter chat for students who were feeling frustrated about how little say they had in the school reform debates going on all around them. At the time, Malamed and two other friends were still in high school, and one friend was in college. But when they formed Student Voice, the group that rose out of that first chat, they agreed that "Revolutionizing education through the voices and actions of students," in whatever form that would take, would be their mission. "Students want to achieve in school. They want to find purpose being in school." said Malamed. "They want to discover their talents. Without students having a voice, we cannot collectively ensure that this will all happen for every student.""

"Ingersoll studies teacher turnover and retention at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the reasons teachers quit, he says, is that they feel they have no say in decisions that ultimately affect their teaching. In fact, this lack of classroom autonomy is now the biggest source of frustration for math teachers nationally. I spoke with Ingersoll to ask him about his research and what schools can do to fix the problem."

"There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways."