In Talladega County Schools in Talladega County, Alabama, teacher leaders known as Experts Down the Hall drive the diffusion of innovation across the district. For over a decade, these teacher leaders, with strong district-level guidance, have supported colleagues to embrace classroom innovation through project-based learning, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), and computational thinking. The program develops teacher leadership while promoting a unified instructional approach districtwide, resulting in sustained innovation that benefits students, teachers, and school communities alike.
Children’s educational experiences are often shaped by where they live. Lloyd Lindley describes the gap between the elementary school he was zoned based on where he lived and the school he was admitted to because of his academic performance and his parents’ persistence. He urges education leaders to recognize the inequities within the system and to take action so that geography does not determine young people’s destiny.
Editor in Chief Kathleen Vail introduces the Spring 2026 issue of Kappan on Curriculum and Instruction.
A lack of coordination and athleticism led Tracy Bare to give up on sports when she was in fifth grade. But when, as a teacher, she was invited to participate in a student-faculty basketball game, she realized that her students couldn’t give up when school was hard so maybe it would be good for her to try something she knew she wasn’t good at. After years of lessons and regular practice, she’s still not good at basketball, but she knows what it feels like to struggle at something and keep going without much success, and she’s better able to relate to students who have that experience with school.
The language teachers use to describe instructional situations can affect what they do next. Connie Hamilton explains how the way teachers frame student work can inform their beliefs about what students can do and how teachers can help them. By adopting language that focuses on concrete observations and invite solutions, teachers take ownership of their ability to improve student learning.
Ashlie Crosson, 2025 National Teacher of the Year, shares highlights of her education journey, how she encourages students to find their voice, and the impact of being a teacher.
Classroom teaching is increasingly complex and stressful, often resulting in burnout. While many solutions emphasize individual self-care, Meghan A. Kessler, Alexis L. Jones, and Evthokia Stephanie Saclarides advocate for institutional support through instructional coaches. Positioned uniquely within schools, coaches can promote teacher well-being by centering care in their practice. Based on a study of seven coaches, they introduce “caring coaching” – a responsive coaching model that explicitly addresses teachers’ holistic needs. To help implement this model, they offer a three-part framework with practical tools to foster a more supportive, humanizing environment that prioritizes care for teachers.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping teaching and learning at a pace that outstrips traditional, top-down school decision-making. As students adopt new tools rapidly, teachers are forced to rethink instruction, assessment, and academic integrity in real time. This article argues that the leadership schools need most is already present in classrooms and needs to be encouraged. Through examples of teacher-led AI innovation and district efforts to structure practice-based professional learning, Elizabeth Radday highlights how teacher leadership can emerge through modeling, experimentation, and peer-to-peer sharing. It concludes with shifts leaders can make to build distributed capacity.
This article follows Katie Ryan’s uneasy entry into a department leadership role and her shift from viewing leadership as an individual authority to a collective practice. Through a series of evolving department team meetings, Ryan illustrates how norms, shared agendas, and protected collaborative time can transform isolated teachers into a distributed leadership community. Drawing on research and lived experience, she argues that sustainable teacher leadership requires time, trust, and institutional support, not just titles or added responsibilities.
New Jersey is facing an unprecedented teacher shortage. Governor Phil Murphy created a Task Force to search for new ways to recruit and retain teachers. Under the leadership of Superintendent David Aderhold, West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District has implemented a new student-teaching program that provides a stipend for select student teachers. Jamie Meeker-Ansloan discusses the origins of this program and early signs of its effectiveness.
Special education teachers often act as hidden leaders in schools, juggling multiple roles such as instructing students with disabilities, managing support staff, leading teams, and guiding families through the special education system. Despite the importance of their work, it’s rarely recognized as leadership, which can lead to professional isolation and burnout. David D. Yang and Lindsay Foreman-Murray use a Collaboration Architect framework to reframe their role. They suggest that school leaders acknowledge and support these invisible leaders to improve inclusive practices and teacher retention.
In this regular Kappan column, Starr Sackstein responds to educators’ work-related questions. A teacher wants to dip her toe into leadership but without leaving the classroom. Starr Sackstein suggests some formal and informal roles teachers can take on to be leaders in their schools and the wider professional community while remaining classroom teachers.
In this regular Kappan column, Starr Sackstein responds to educators’ work-related questions. In this issue, a reader who feels comfortable collecting data about her students’ performance isn’t sure how to use that data effectively. Sackstein offers a series of suggestions for making checks for understanding more effective and less challenging.
Most teachers care deeply about their students and their work, but the demands of the profession lead many to leave. Teacher preparation and development focus on content and pedagogy, rather than the soft skills that can prevent burnout and enable teachers to stay. Deborah Connelie and Carlotta Cooprider recommend a SCAN model that enables teachers to specify the source of their stress, center the most important aspect of the task, ask themselves and others what will help, and navigate within the boundaries set for them.
The traditional pathway into teaching delays exposure to the realities of the work. At the same time, tutors, paraprofessionals, and others who are already working with young learners are not traditionally treated as being on the pathway into the teaching profession. PDK CEO Jeanie Lee explains how Educators Rising gives middle and high school students opportunities to explore teaching, building the front end of the educator pathway. More systems that reduce costs and create a seamless transition into teaching are needed.
Education reforms are doomed to fail if they don’t get at the underlying reasons students are learning. Stanley Pogrow has found that one hidden barrier to learning is that curriculum and instruction are not presented in engaging or entertaining ways. He describes how he has observed teachers incorporating dramatic scenarios into lessons. These approaches get students excited about creative problem-solving using curriculum content. He urges teacher education programs to offer instruction in the use of drama and schools to give teachers freedom to use these techniques.
As part of a multiyear, multistate National Science Foundation-funded research study, Liz Carletta, Douglas B. Larkin, Suzanne Poole Patzelt, Khadija M. Ahmed, and Mayra Perna interviewed educators from districts with higher-than-average novice science teacher retention. They found six factors that can be applied at the school level to increase the likelihood of K-12 teacher retention across grade levels and subject areas. They present the framework of teacher embeddedness as a useful tool to help predict and improve retention efforts and suggest specific strategies teachers and administrators can employ to improve teacher retention in their schools.
Many U.S. high schoolers seem unprepared or ill-equipped when it comes to their understanding of what it means to speak another language and how to positively participate and interact in an increasingly globalized world. Rachel Hawthorne unpacks and questions current accepted practices in foreign-language instruction in U.S. high schools and its effect on this reality. By focusing on grammar over conversation, she argues, language courses are failing to foster fluency. Drawing on research and international comparisons, she calls for a redefinition of language-learning success and urges schools to adopt methods that cultivate confident, communicatively capable students ready for global engagement
Bryan Butcher Jr., Oregon’s 2025 Teacher of the Year, discusses overcoming math anxiety, building confidence as a new teacher, and teaching as an art form.
Assistant principals play a complex and often underappreciated role in K-12 schools. Lilicea H. Hester examines three leadership models that tend characterize the work of the assistant principal – collaborative, reactive, and defender–and their implications for school culture, instructional leadership, and professional growth. Intentional development, mentorship, and systemic support is needed to empower assistant principals as strategic leaders. By elevating the visibility and influence of second-chair leadership, schools can build stronger, more resilient leadership teams that drive meaningful student success.
