News: Successful Schools

Preparing for Excellence This Coming School Year: Summer Planning to Strategically Transform Classroom Instruction (Part I)

Blog focuses on the importance of strategic summer planning to drive school improvement during the coming new school year. Focusing on improving classroom instruction, the Blog outlines seven research...

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Students’ Behavior is NOT Improving. . . But It Can: Classroom Management Lessons for Teachers from the Detroit Lions’ Shocking Playoff Loss

This Blog describes a national survey showing that student discipline and classroom management continues to get worse. Asserting that students can’t fix themselves, it uses the improvement of the NFL’...

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Education’s 2024 Year in Review: The Themes that Captured Our Time, Attention, Concern, and Consternation

This Blog revisits the 24 Blogs published this year, re-organizing them into four themes as part of an education-focused “Year in Review.” A brief analysis of these themes is provided relative to wher...

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School Improvement Requires Changing Thinking, Not Just Changing Programs: The “Moneyball Thinking” Needed in Education

Using the movie “Moneyball” as a metaphor, we suggest that many districts and schools are locked into antiquated data analysis and school improvement thinking. We advocate that they use “Moneyball Thi...

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Speed Counts When Making Successful Changes Across Your District or School—When to Go Slow and When to Go Fast

This Blog emphasizes that the success of a district or school’s change process or initiative often rests on the speed of its implementation. We review ten variables that help determine if a change pro...

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How Fad or Flawed School Programs Increase Poor Teacher Morale and Resistance to Change: When Education Keeps Adopting the Same Shaky Stuff, It Will Keep Getting Repeated Rocky Results (Part V)

Blog reviewed and integrated recent articles reporting that (a) teachers’ job satisfaction and mental health worsened last year, as did the need for student supports and interventions; and (b) distric...

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