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Nearly every study of employer needs over the past 20 years comes up with the same answers. Successful workers communicate effectively orally and in writing and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems like financial or health literacy.

All students should master a verifiable set of skills, but not necessarily the same skills. High schools fail so many kids partly because educators can't get free of the notion that all students -- regardless of their career aspirations -- need the same basic preparation. As states pile on academic courses, they give less attention to the arts and downplay career and technical education to make way for a double portion of math.

Great coaches ask young athletes to go to "great heights" to challenge themselves. They take care to prepare the athlete for each stage of development, but they cannot eradicate risk because it's inseparable from growth. They can, however, intervene to ensure that the risk isn't so great that it outweighs the reward of accomplishment

The best coaches encourage young people to work hard, keep going when it would be easier to stop, risk making potentially painful errors, try again when they stumble, and learn to love the sport. Not a bad analogy for a dynamic classroom.

passionate about their sport and understand it deeply

"In the end, you can track this back to high school math. We're very good at the high end, but math is the place most students fail … that's the biggest challenge of them all. How do we get young people to learn math?"

First, successful change leaders clearly articulate the need for change to a variety of audiences in ways that are intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling. The ability to do this requires that change leaders immerse themselves into radically different worlds

nderstand deeply is the world for which they are preparing their students

what skills, what habits of mind, and what dispositions

The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school

If  a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.

Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.

High-school textbooks are devices that regurgitate the universally accepted and least debated ideas from the field of science and technology, almost placing us in an isolated prism where we learn to accept knowledge.

our second biggest obstacle lies in the method of evaluation we have accepted to assess all students. I feel that much of our attention is channelized towards evaluating the amount of knowledge a student possesses. This focus would be better shifted if we start to question what the individual is able to do with their knowledge and to what extent they can they apply their learning toward writing textbooks of their own.

ack on the assembly line, our society didnʼt need innovators and thinkers shaping a shared vision for the field of their expertise. Now that weʼre getting trained for jobs which potentially donʼt exist today, itʼs crucial for educators to turn their attention to building the right aptitude just as much as they focus on instilling the informational aspects.

Here's why: such frustration is a precursor to deep, lasting learning. That's right, students' grasp of new concepts and skills is often better when they struggle through the process of learning those concepts and skills than when teachers error-proof that process.

elping students troubleshoot their errors like this should be a primary role of every teacher. There's nothing to troubleshoot, though, if kids never run into troubl

Lesson planning should thus be more about anticipating students' errors and preparing to help them learn from those errors than trying to develop presentations that prevent all errors. Provide students activities that involve applying information, and be ready to help them when they get tripped up

The ability to work well with others - flexibility and interpersonal skills - seemed to be a bigger factor in teacher retention than where the teacher went to college. Other things like experience and instructional skills also were big factors.

Our research suggests that teacher workforce improvements can be derived from more careful hiring decisions,

such as whether a teacher would be good at teaching students to be good citizens, Goldhaber said.

Leaders who are truly (1) servant-hearted; (2) able to put others and the organization first ; and, (3) willing to listen with humility to other points of view are the ones that people will follow. Thus, if you want to win in today’s hyper-competitive world of work you should (1) hire, promote and retain people who fit that description; and, (2) strive to fit it yourself.