Did you know that the average urban school misplaces nearly $20,000 worth of assets each year? And that for large schools, that sum can be twice as much? Shocking, right? You don’t have to be a budget expert to know that these sums represent a lot of money – money that could be used to hire another teacher, invest in development programs, or purchase badly needed supplies.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if nearly all of those resources could be recouped with a small investment in an intelligent asset management solution? In this piece, we talk with an education startup that’s on a mission to do exactly that!

A mirage is something that appears real or possible, but is in fact illusory or without substance. It’s also the title of TNTP’s report on teacher development, aptly named because of the widely held (yet mistaken) belief among education leaders that we know how to help teachers improve. In this piece, we review the report’s conclusions and recommendations. Along the way, we provide some additional perspectives that we think will allow educators to better implement the report's ideas.

To close out the week, we wanted to bring your something fun! And that's why we decided to talk to James Sanders, co-founder of Breakout EDU, about how the company's platform is helping to bring engagement into the classroom.

Breakout EDU is the classroom version of an escape room. What’s an escape room you ask? It’s a real-world game consisting of a series of timed puzzles that participants must solve in order to escape a locked room. Now it goes without saying that locking students up in a classroom isn’t going to fly. But that’s where Breakout EDU comes in! It’s a student-centered platform that uses a locked box and numerous challenges to inspire creativity and problem-solving.

“When you’re just pretending and reading Madame Bovary because everyone else reads it . . . Who cares! That’s SO boring. Ooh, and now we’re reading Hamlet. And this is the place where we get to talk about Polonius. Stale. It’s absolutely stale. And no real learning will take place in an environment like that.”

These are just a few of the thoughts Matthew Patterson, winner of last year’s TNTP Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice, offered to us on how he selects literature in his classroom. We recently had a chance to chat with Mr. Patterson, and in the process, ended up having an unbelievably fascinating (and hilarious) conversation on how to design curriculum. Enjoy!

Having a strong facilities strategy often means having extra dollars for educating students. And that’s never a bad thing. But the vision and planning this requires is often overlooked. So for this piece we decided to talk with Malka Borrego, Founder and CEO of the Equitas Academy network, on how she plans for and executes on her facilities strategy. The examples she provides are an excellent indication of the long-term thinking required to successfully navigate such decisions.

Bird Brain Science is a one-stop shop where science teachers can find standards-aligned passages and articles that are tiered to meet each student’s reading level. It aims to bridge the gap between the curricular goals and objectives of a science classroom and the reality of students’ reading and comprehension skills.

And it was created by Brendan Finch, who taught in a middle school science classroom for several years. After seeing how effective differentiated science passages were for his own students, Brendan knew he was onto something . . .

According to Hrag, people’s understanding of how culture works is flipped. A lot of people think a school’s culture is predicated on academic excellence, but it’s quite the opposite. Academic excellence is predicated on student and school culture. That also means that systems in many schools are set-up to prioritize the wrong thing. Most schools are so focused on performance, they ask questions like: “How do we get the test scores we want” or “What assessments do we need to create?” But unless you have instilled in children the fundamental attitude of “I want to learn” they’re never going to meet your expectations. Read on to learn how Hrag thinks about strong student culture!

The amount of feedback and coaching teachers are receiving is way too low. If making teachers better is the absolute greatest lever in impacting student performance, then we should be striving to do it every day. We don’t give students feedback once a month or once a semester, so why should feedback for teachers be any different? Further, by examining the best-performing schools around the country, we clearly see that they share an emphasis on strong teacher development. Read on to hear how Paul recommends we increase the frequency of development!

Spending time with a great mind is time well spent. And reading Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track allows us a glimpse inside one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The book is a collection of letters that Richard Feynman wrote throughout his career to scientists, fans, family members, students, politicians, and the public. Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who won the Noble Prize in 1965 and was famous for popularizing science for the masses. In this piece, we reflect on Richard’s perceptions of his own schooling and how we might help students be a little more creative in theirs.

Throughout the year, we expect our students to demonstrate growth and master the content we deliver. We use data to track their progress and provide remediation when needed. When it comes to our teachers, however, we rarely discuss the tools that help them get better. As we’ll see, live coaching is one of the best tools around. At Village Prep Woodland Hills, the school team has been working on and refining their live coaching practices over the last several years. And that’s why we decided to talk to Chris O’Brien and Ronald Brownrigg about the culture they’ve built around coaching.

Charlie Friedman is the Founder and Head of School at Nashville Classical, a charter elementary school in Nashville, TN that opened its doors in 2013. The school serves nearly 300 students in grades K-3. Charlie is focused on doubling the number of advanced, low-income elementary students in Nashville and creating the long-term plan that will achieve it. We recently chatted with him about teacher hiring and retention practices. This post covers some of the insights he provided to us on the hiring front.