School leaders are relied on as chief problem solvers.  Their willingness and capacity to take on this challenging role is essential to school success.  Traditional leadership training, however, often falls short in providing the requisite skills to support leaders in maximizing their potential impact on school growth, and particularly on the development of teaching capacity:

As I work with schools across the country, I notice three areas of need as they return to school face-to-face instruction after the pandemic. There is a need to RESTORE - Restore relationships, restore community and restore instruction. Many have not taken the time to address these areas and find themselves asking “Is it June yet?” It is important for schools to realize that they cannot return to “school as normal”; they must do things differently. They must take the best of the lessons learned from the wake of Covid 19 and embed them in the “new way” of doing things differently.

Holding an Initial License as a teacher in Massachusetts opens up your career prospects significantly, and is mandated after five years teaching on a Provisional License. Yet updating your license during the pandemic, like most aspects of teaching and learning, has been a challenge. It’s why the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MA DESE) issued an emergency licensure order when teachers could not attend classes to earn the credits and fulfill the criteria they needed to advance. Having been extended once, from June 2021 to June 2022, the ‘grace period’ is now coming to an end, to ensure all teachers are appropriately licensed going forward.

As US education gains momentum towards getting young people back into classrooms in-person, we note that districts at least, are really prioritizing learning recovery (for lack of a better term) right now. Although it’s encouraging to see things heading in the right direction, there's still a lot of unknowns.

When reading about different learning styles, I came across this study in the book, Special Populations in Gifted Education: Understanding Our Most Able Students From Diverse Backgrounds, edited by J.A. Castellano, A.D.Frazier. This study was fascinating to me as an educator and made me question how I plan lessons to maximize classroom learning and engagement.

Schools are adapting quickly to embrace new approaches to observation cycles that improve their effectiveness, whilst also aligning with their current remote or hybrid delivery.

“Teaching involves human connection, and I feel like that’s been taken away from me,” shared one teacher with The New York Times in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, educators, students, and parents alike have resiliently forged ahead to ensure learning continues despite the distance. They’ve mastered video conferences, learning management systems, and digital applications designed to make learning more interactive, but one thing remains a struggle: human connection.

The most common observational methods used in schools tend to focus on teaching rather than learning and so often fall short of measuring the impact of the teachers’ hard work. This article discusses the discipline of Effective Learning Observation (ELO), which is expanding in popularity and usage across the US as school leaders seek better ways to measure the quality of learning in their schools, and to inform more impactful improvement strategies.

As current school leaders, we have to be mindful of how we will create school cultures that will support the social emotional needs of our teachers and students and their families. Now more than ever, there is a need for people to share and understand as we seek to make sense of our world today. There is a need to begin emotional and psychological healing but that can only happen when we create safe spaces to share our anxieties and fears.

The varied ability across classrooms in the United States is, oftentimes, a daunting challenge for today’s teachers. Considering the limited time and resources available in which to meet all those needs, leaves the educator asking the question, how do I divide my time, resources and myself in order to effectively meet the needs of all my learners? This article will examine how teachers can leverage high impact, research based instructional literacy principles and strategies in order to achieve academic growth across all content areas.