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Our expert researchers, evaluators, and veteran educators synthesize information gleaned from our research and blend it with best practices gathered from schools and districts around the world to bring you insightful and practical ideas that support changing the odds of success for you and your students. By aligning practice with research, we mix professional wisdom with real world experience to bring you unexpectedly insightful and uncommonly practical ideas that offer ways to build student resiliency, close achievement gaps, implement retention strategies, prioritize improvement initiatives, build staff motivation, and interpret data and understand its impact.

Aug 24
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Why not creativity?

By Blog, Curiosity, Engaging Classrooms, Everyday Innovation, School Improvement, Teaching No Comments

As we talk with more and more educators about the importance and power of curiosity in teaching and learning, a question we often hear is: How does curiosity differ from creativity? Creativity is on many teachers’ minds as they prepare their students for real-world experiences. It consistently shows up as a desirable attribute many employers seek in the modern workforce. Check out any airport bookstore and you’re almost sure to find books and magazine articles upholding creativity as an ideal way to transform everyday interactions into sources of both joy and profit.

McREL’s focus on curiosity doesn’t preclude creativity—far from it! It’s just that we agree with Erik Shonstrom, in Wild Curiosity: How to Unleash Creativity and Encourage Lifelong Wondering, when he says that “to be creative one must first be curious. Being in an environment that fosters curiosity is vital to the creative process.” In other words, curiosity is the precursor to creativity.

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Aug 20
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A brief introduction to curiosity

By Blog, Books, Curiosity, Engaging Classrooms, Instructional Coaching, Leadership Coaching, Research Insights, School Improvement, Teaching 21 Comments

What makes you, or your students, curious about a particular topic?

And have you ever been curious about curiosity itself? What is it, exactly? What triggers it? How can we best use curiosity in teaching and learning? Can it be encouraged (or discouraged), harnessed, and strengthened (or weakened)?

These questions, and more, have captured our interest here at McREL, and have driven us to review research studies and academic publications, and talk with educators in the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere about the use of curiosity in instructional planning and delivery, and its effects on students and adult learners. We’ve been so intrigued by what we’ve learned that, in addition to incorporating our findings into our peer-to-peer coaching work with educators, we’ve written several books recently about the power of curiosity, including Curiosity Works, Unstuck, and, due out in September, Out of Curiosity: Restoring the Power of Hungry Minds for Better Schools, Workplaces, and Lives.

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May 18
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We need a stronger teacher pipeline. It’ll take better selection, preparation, pay, and respect

By Blog, Current Affairs, Future of Schooling, Teaching No Comments

Recent teacher strikes and demonstrations across the U.S. have made it clear that many teachers believe they are undervalued, both financially and in terms of societal respect. And surveys show that many teachers are also feeling frustrated and stressed from too many mandates and too little support.

As a perhaps not-too-surprising result, it was clear even before the recent protests that recruitment and retention of teachers was spiraling downward for lots of reasons. Attrition is happening at every stage of the career path: Too few people are entering the profession, particularly in high-need areas such as math, science, and special education. And of those who do sign up, too many leave, too quickly—unable to resist the allure of doing, well, just about anything else

And what about quality? Even if we could snap our fingers and make teacher shortages a thing of the past, would the new teachers we recruited (and/or the existing teachers we persuaded to stay around) be the best available? Or just the best we decided we could afford?

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Apr 09
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Just write it!

By Blog No Comments

The theme for the April edition of Educational Leadership magazine—“Learning to Write, Writing to Learn”—got McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin thinking about how writing has changed since his school days. Noting that many business leaders have taken a back-to-the-future approach to note-taking, Bryan decided to ditch his digital assistant and put pen to paper once again

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Mar 26
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Middle school math teachers learn formative assessment skills to overcome students’ anxiety

By Assessment, Blog, Math, STEM, GreenSTEM & STEAM No Comments

Even in the most supportive of middle schools, students’ performance in math and science can decline sharply. With a larger peer group to judge themselves against, many students who exuded confidence in elementary school no longer feel they can measure up, and stop trying—harming not only the students but society at large. Fortunately, new research from McREL and IMPAQ International shows that math teachers can help by significantly boosting their use of formative assessment, without sacrificing other responsibilities.

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Mar 15
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School culture: Secret sauce or missing ingredient?

By Blog, Leadership Insights, Research Insights, School Improvement No Comments

Frustratingly for practitioners, research often tell us what a phenomenon is, but not why it came to be that way. And that can strand us without an answer to the most important question: How should we manipulate inputs to achieve the outputs we desire?

So it is with school culture. In his column for the March edition of ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin recounts how a conversation with a principal caused him to reexamine his long-held stance that school culture is the “secret sauce” of high-performing schools. The problem for that principal, Bryan writes, was the difficulty of teasing apart correlation from causation. Does a strong, healthy school culture cause high performance? Or might it be the other way around?

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Jan 30
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The measurement gap: Advocating for a new generation of assessments

By Assessment, Blog, Curiosity, Engaging Classrooms, Research Insights, School Improvement No Comments

By now it’s a commonplace observation that academic success alone isn’t generally adequate to ensure success in college and career. Without minimizing the importance of academic skills, it’s also important to recognize that personality traits like intrinsic motivation, persistence, resilience, and curiosity play a huge role in how far students ultimately advance. Yet, because academic skills are relatively easy to test for, that’s what schools keep measuring—and thus what society seems to keep valuing, potentially depriving students of meaningful growth and learning opportunities.

McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin uses his Research Matters column in ASCD’s February 2018 Educational Leadership magazine to advocate for expanding student assessments to develop a fuller understanding of the causes of success.

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