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The important moral is to simply keep trying until you find a passion worth working long hours even over rough nights.

best goal a young high-school student can set is to gain a balance between a wide range of skill sets; any and all of the skills can help them succeed when they eventually find their niche.

worked together over months to build the most effective lessons they could, critiquing each version, adding new ideas, testing them out, until the whole group was satisfied that the lesson was as good as it could be.

ratio between prep time and teaching time in the Shanghai schools we visited.  In the U.S., she said, teachers typically have one hour to prepare for five classes.  In the Shanghai schools, they have four hours to prepare for two hours of teaching. This, she said, makes all the difference.  Teachers can use this time to collaborate with other teachers to craft great lessons, to talk with other teachers about particular students' learning needs and how they might work together to address them, or to do the research needed to get ready to do another improvement project. 

All teachers are expected to do it, and getting good at is it one of the criteria for moving up the career ladder

hat fascinated our team was the way teachers were expected to write short papers about the research they had done and to publish these research papers in a range of juried journals, some published by universities.

Of course they did not do well this way.  How could they do well in language and mathematics without a balanced curriculum, without a faculty that showed that they loved them, without music, art and PE?

his whole enormous system was on pretty much the same page for the same reasons, not because they had been told to do something in particular, but because the discussions they had been involved in had led them to the same conclusions about the goals and the most effective ways to achieve the

One was the clarity of the system's curriculum expectations.  There is a core curriculum that accounts for about 70 percent of the available time that is required for all students. The courses are spelled out and the system approves the textbooks that will be used. 

hat it had clearly been honed and then honed again to remove everything that was not essential and to give the connections in the logic of the instruction an air of inevitability that seemed, as he put it, simply elegant.

he common thread, he said, was the way teachers were treated, in every way, as professionals.

The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission clearly views its teachers, not university researchers, as the main drivers of improvements in student performance. 

teachers talked about the importance of constantly getting better, which meant improving their own skills and improving the curriculum and instruction and therefore improving student performance.  Like doctors, engineers and attorneys in the United States, they saw keeping up with the latest developments in their field and changing their practice in the light of those advancements as a core part of their responsibility.  That is why professional development and school improvement are thought of as synonymous by Shanghai officials. 

hey accepted the idea that they were not functioning autonomously in their classrooms, but accountable to their peers and colleagues for the quality of their own work and for their contribution to the common enterprise.   These are all hallmarks of a true profession. 

Last year, Iowa’s universities launched an effort to share language courses online. The first was in classic Greek, which an ISU student took from a U of I professor in Iowa City. This year, three ISU students enrolled in classic Greek. The universities may expand to Arabic or Chinese, officials said.

“the octopus room.” The classroom’s brain is a motion-sensing camera that follows an instructor around the room. Microphones triangulate the location of a voice so that the camera can focus on the person speaking. Six black arms with video monitors are attached to the “brain” in the center. This allows students in the class and those taking it online to see and hear each other.

They do a very good job of simulating the classroom experience,” he said. “But you have to have the discipline to stay up with it. If you get a week or so behind, it’s hard to catch up

blend of in-person and online instruction. Students taking finals at the U of I’s secure testing rooms, for example, might be enrolled in a daily Spanish language course where two days of class every week are completed online. That allows the instructor to focus classroom time on refining conversation and reading skills, faculty said.

“Part of that land-grant mission is educating the masses, and the masses have changed.”

Offering experienced faculty teachers and classroom space filled with well-equipped laboratories is a key way for Iowa’s universities to differentiate themselves from online-only colleges, officials said.

However, disciplines that don’t require physical space may one day be based mostly or entirely online, said Marcus Haack, a U of I professor who teaches future principals and superintendents in an education leadership program that many participants take online.

In 40 years in this business, I’ve learned we will never put the brakes on technology. It’s always going to expand our opportunities, our thinking and creativity