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Helping students move through difficult emotions like frustration and shame is vital work. This article from Edutopia provides tips on helping students take the next steps to resilience.

Fisher argues against the claims of NYT columnist David Brooks and others that "relationships do not scale"--she is worried this will mean high-quality relationships are boutique experiences for only certain kinds of schools.

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In this article, the author makes an important distinction between "relationships skills" (SEL as it is commonly understood and taught") and "relationship access." She writes, "We need to interrogate the “social” in social emotional learning. Teaching social skills is critical; but I often find myself wondering whether said SEL skill development is occurring in a vacuum from schools brokering new and authentic relationships."

Our children are more than the sum of their school grades. Behind every exam result lies a whole person with incalculable, untapped potential and myriad facets and capacities just waiting to be discovered. What a child shows she knows in school is not an accurate measure of her lifelong learning ability or her human potential.

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In this article, the author explores how a focus on grades and external rewards can dampen students' engagement and motivation, or shut it down completely: "Intrinsic motivators can be key to student achievement – but extrinsic motivation dominates classrooms"

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Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students.

“We want students to feel they have agency, and it’s really hard to imagine someone who doesn’t have agency instilling it in someone else,” says Ben Martell, a researcher with Project Zero in this article about the power of playfulness (and agency) in learning.

Becoming expert at something requires consistent practice, with room for mistakes, setbacks, and revision. Mastery-based schools work in a similar way, with an emphasis on feedback, revision, and progress over time, rather than on a single assessment or standardized test.

What motivates us as humans and as students? In this article from Usable Knowledge, key elements of motivation are explored (spoiler: it's not the extrinsic stuff). As the author puts it, ""Despite the common misperception that some people just naturally have or lack motivation, science shows that the nature of caregiving relationships and opportunities for safe exploration affect the development of these systems — for better or for worse."

In this recent column from the Washington Post, Education writer Valerie Strauss talks to Linda Darling Hammond about which education policies really help students. Surprise, surprise, standardized tests requirements aren't one of them.

This white paper offers practical guidance to administrators in teacher-powered schools in the areas of managing conflict, teacher evaluation and feedback, leadership style, and more.

We've been thinking a lot about cooking and what makes it an engaging endeavor for us. Why are we motivated to attempt an imperfect dish a second or a third time? This video from Edutopia seems related. It's about giving students time to make mistakes, learn from them, edit, revise, and revise again, all before giving a grade.

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Teachers who help students improve noncognitive skills such as self-regulation raise their grades and likelihood of graduating from high school more than teachers who help them improve their standardized test scores do.

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