Meaningful conversation can make learning more personal, immediate, and emotional. During meaningful conversations, students are forced to be accountable for their positions, to listen, to analyze opposing perspectives, and to adapt their thinking on the fly. There are many popular strategies for these kinds of conversations and these sentence stems will prove useful in whichever strategy you use.

Aspects of executive function, including the ability to focus attention and working memory and to self-regulate actions, can be improved with explicit teaching, support, and practice, even among preschoolers. Here are ways you help your students build skills that are critical for regulating their emotions and behavior.

Classroom discussions have been a staple of teaching forever, beginning with Socrates. For classroom discussions to be effective the level of student participation is key. It's not enough for students to simply pay attention -- they need to be active participants to generate one of those great discussions that end far too quickly for both the teacher and students. Try out these 5 ways to improve discussions in your classroom.

Using technology in the classroom–and using it effectively–might require some slight adjustments on the part of the teacher to sustain the effort, creative problem-solving, and innovation required to actually improve learning through the use of technology. This occurs at the belief level–what teachers believe about technology, education, and their own abilities to manage technology.

This article is an excerpt from the book 13 THINGS MENTALLY STRONG PARENTS DON’T DO: Raising Self-Assured Children and Training Their Brains for a Life of Happiness, Meaning, and Success by Amy Morin. Learn why doing everything for children results in kids who are unprepared for the rigors of adulthood. They lack the skills necessary to succeed in college, the military, or a job.

Mental strength is what helps kids bounce back from setbacks and it gives them the strength to keep going, even when they're plagued with self-doubt. A strong mental muscle is the key to helping kids reach their greatest potential in life. Raising a mentally strong kid requires parents avoid these 13 things.

Like businesses and relationships, schools live and die (or pass and fail) by communication. So what can they do to make it better? Here are just a few surprisingly simple ideas to improve communication, from informal teacher huddles to professional culture surveys.

There was a time in the past when “marketing” was viewed as inconsequential, perhaps even harmful to a school. However, as many schools are buffeted by demographic shifts, resistance to high tuition, competition from new education models, and increased demands from millennial parents, the perception of the “M” word is changing. The time is right to define what marketing can do for your school, what is beyond marketing’s influence, and most interesting, what issues it can address that are not apparent at first glance

Mitch Resnick, one of the creators of Scratch, shares why he thinks coding should be taught in all schools—it's not the reason you’d expect.

Though failure is often described solely as a means to determine a path towards success, educators and panelists at a recent two-day event at Teachers College, Columbia University stressed the importance of incorporating failure into learning and the ways to use it productively, in higher ed classes, K-12 classrooms and teacher preparation programs.

Those of us in caregiving fields have long recognized that trauma is toxic to students' brains and spirits as well as their bodies. Most researchers now view trauma as resulting not only from catastrophic events, but also from ongoing stressors. Many K–12 students are experiencing ongoing life stresses and being sensitive to these students is a huge challenge. Teachers get mired down in the wreckage of the behavior a child is showing—or the bullet point they are trying to cover in the instruction plan. How can we maintain a thriving learning environment and respond to students who are experiencing ongoing trauma or short-term distress in ways that recognize their emotional needs?

The Center for Christian Urban Educators seeks to encourage, equip, and empower Christian educators as they impact the lives of the children entrusted to their educational care.