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One theme that resonated with me was discussing the knowledge and skill sets needed for teachers beginning to explore their leadership potential. While many schools and districts offer new teacher mentoring programs, there is a lack of formal programs or supports for emerging teacher leaders.

Effective teachers develop a range of knowledge and skills from managing a classroom community and helping students learn. But beyond the competence of subject matter knowledge, teachers may also develop skillsets in pedagogy and other areas.

teacher leaders need to work collaboratively with administration in order for teacher leadership to be the norm throughout a school.

The Obama administration announced a new $185 million competition Friday that would reward colleges for producing teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests. The competition would require states to provide data linking collegiate teaching programs inside their borders to the test scores of their graduates' students. Under the proposal, to be eligible for the money, states would have to ratchet up teacher-licensing exams and close persistently low-performing teacher-training programs.

In a news conference Friday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that that nearly two-thirds of new teachers report feeling unprepared to run classes. "What if 62% of our new doctors felt unprepared to practice medicine?" said Mr. Duncan, adding that "the status quo is unacceptable."

Evidence is mounting that teacher quality is the biggest in-school determinant of student achievement. Yet the nation's colleges of education are a patchwork of programs that vary in quality. Each state sets its own admissions, graduation and licensing requirements.

As it turns out, Alcala's students aren't the only ones who can benefit from exercises like "my favorite no." A new study by two French researchers published in the Journal of Psychology: General shows how telling students that failure is a natural element of learning -- instead of pressuring them to succeed -- may increase their academic performance.

"We wanted to show that even if you put children in a situation where there's no pressure, the simple fact that they're confronted with difficulty could trigger a disruption in their performance."

To verify this hypothesis, Croizet and Autin conducted three studies among sixth graders in their city, Poitiers. In one experiment, they gave 111 sixth graders an impossible set of anagrams to solve. Then Autin told one group of kids that "learning is difficult and failure is common," but hard work will help, "like riding a bicycle." Autin asked a second group of kids how they attacked the problems after the test. When both groups, plus a control group, then took an exam that measured working memory -- a capacity often used to predict IQ -- the students Autin had counseled performed "significantly better" than both groups, especially on the tougher questions.