Walk into a classroom at Mosaic School of Fine Arts, and the lesson isn’t simply about completing an assignment. Students investigate, create, question, revise, and share what they discover together. Learning becomes something they build rather than something they receive. That shift begins with a different assumption about children: they are capable of being artists […]
Before sunrise on a June morning in Yellowstone National Park, a group of students from Washington Jesuit Academy in Washington, D.C., stood on Blacktail Plateau in the dark, radio telemetry equipment crackling in their hands, tracking a signal that could be the Rescue Creek wolf pack. They had studied this moment. During the school year, […]
A first-year math teacher stands in her classroom, walls covered in anchor charts that promise mistakes are welcome. She spent her summer building rich, open-ended tasks — the kind she loved in graduate school. On the first day, she learns every student’s name. She is ready. Then she hands out the math task. Every hand […]
Imagine being a parent who does not believe they have the capacity to help their kindergartener learn to read. Or a second-grade teacher who wishes she could motivate a family to surface from chronic absenteeism. Or the librarian of a local library stocked with new resources for emerging readers, but whose community is unaware of […]
When preparing young people for the future, we often focus on academic success, career readiness, and character development. While those areas are essential, some of the most important life lessons begin with something much more fundamental: knowing how to care for oneself and one’s family. At Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago (BGCC), cooking programs […]
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” When James Baldwin wrote those words in 1963, he captured the exact tightrope that educators walk today. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026, teachers are not just reflecting on a historical […]
Every child deserves access to quality education in a safe and supportive learning environment. Yet for many children in rural Ghana, that opportunity remains out of reach because of inadequate school facilities and limited educational resources. After watching a documentary on social media that highlighted the educational challenges facing children in underserved communities, Loretta Adu, […]
The math of the modern American workforce is quietly fracturing at the shoreline. For every five skilled tradespeople who retire nationwide, only two enter the field. This widening generational gap leaves a staggering annual vacancy of 1.7 million skilled labor roles. While public conversation centers on construction or automotive infrastructure, a parallel crisis unfolds at […]
There are few moments more moving than watching children carrying their desks down a mountain trail into a brand-new classroom. Resting them above their heads, they march together; laughing, singing, and shouting with excitement. The older students make extra trips to help the younger ones, but everyone carries something. For the children of La Colonia […]
Years ago, when Sharanda Morehead was a teacher at LEARN Romano Butler in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale, she remembers how Margaret Romano would pop into her classroom about once a week. Romano, a pioneering leader and lifelong champion of the LEARN network, would say things like, “How are things going?” or “What do […]
