While district leaders and policymakers often focus on sweeping reforms, teachers can get big results with modest adjustments, managing their classrooms just a little differently. This paper introduces seven simple shifts from our Tilting Your Teaching book—research-based, practice-proven techniques every teacher can use to gain (or regain) student focus, engagement, and cooperation.

Before teachers can leverage the benefits of student engagement, they need to know what it is, where it comes from, and why it’s so hard to maintain as students age. Here we review the evidence, present McREL’s definition of student engagement, and provide strategies to assess and improve students’ engagement with academics and the entire school community.

McREL conducted an evaluation of Education Galaxy’s Online Assessment, Practice, and Instruction programs on 4th grade math and reading, using a study design that meets ESSA’s Tier 2 Moderate Evidence standard. Our study found grade-level gains in math (0.58) and reading (0.30), for students using the programs.

Adopting, adapting, or creating an instructional model could be the key to boosting instructional consistency for all students while also encouraging teacher creativity. In this paper, we present an introduction to instructional models, explain how they differ from frameworks, and give advice on helping school teams cohere around an initiative that has a high likelihood of benefiting students.

Professional learning sessions can be a good starting point to share foundational practices with groups of teachers, but it should be followed up with individual plans of action and ongoing self-reflection to sustain and embed the learning in daily practices. This paper describes characteristics of effective PL and gives an overview of a self-reflection process teachers can use to drive their own professional growth.

Recent studies find that teacher performance, on average, improves dramatically during an educator’s first few years on the job and then continues to improve in subsequent years, albeit less dramatically. This paper makes a case for schools and districts to invest more into teachers’ career-long professional learning and describes how to develop, support, and advance educator expertise.

Knowing how memory works can help teachers deliver instruction in a way that helps students better learn, recall, and apply new knowledge. This paper describes a brain-science-based model for teaching and learning that can guide teachers’ instructional planning and increase their students’ interest in, and motivation for, learning. (48 words)

If every student were curious, self-motivated, and passionate about their learning, wouldn’t our classrooms and schools be more joyful, dynamic, and innovative? This paper lays the groundwork for McREL’s Curiosity Works model for school improvement—an inside-out, curiosity-driven approach that builds on schools’ bright spots and drives improvement and innovation.

Teachers can support each other’s’ professional learning, teaming up for mutual support and growth. This paper presents a peer-coaching triad model, in which three-person teams of teachers take turns coaching, being coached, and observing each other. While school leadership can promote and support the triads by offering structures and guidance, teachers themselves are empowered to conduct the coaching on their own.

In this paper, McREL’s CEO Bryan Goodwin urges education leaders and policymakers to rethink the top-down way we’ve approached school improvement and reform for the past three decades. He presents an alternative inside-out, bottom-up model that begins by putting curiosity, for both educators and students, at the center of learning and unleashing a powerful, more engaging system of teaching, learning, and leading.