We know we need to do a better job at helping our teachers develop and honoring that growth with prestige and pay. But the question is how to do it without sacrificing creativity and purpose along the way. This week, we are featuring a 2-part interview with Emily Schneider-Krzys, Chief Talent Officer at KIPP Austin.

KIPP Austin recently implemented a Teacher Career Pathway that elegantly ties together the development and advancement of its teachers. In this first part of our interview, Emily shares her thoughts on getting the design of a career ladder right, including the obstacles her team encountered, the specific structures of the Pathway, and the values the program is based on.

We recently had the chance to speak with Malka Borrego, Founder and CEO of the Equitas Academy Charter School network, about managing school facilities and creating a strong board of directors. In the first part of our interview, focusing on facilities, Malka shared with us some key metrics for managing the facilities budget and how she does her homework when making decisions in this area. In this piece, we shift our focus to how Malka built the board of directors at Equitas and how the needs of her board have changed over time.

Back in March, we posted the first installment of a conversation we had with Hrag Hamalian, Chief Executive Officer of Bright Star Schools. In that piece, Hrag told us that academic excellence is predicated on student culture and he shared with us a number of programs used at Bright Star. This time around, we shift gears and discuss staff culture. We cover topics like work-life balance, valuing teacher input, and creating a salary schedule that gets teachers to stay in the classroom. Oh, and along the way Hrag gives us plenty of ideas for infusing fun into an organization. We hope you enjoy round 2 with Hrag Hamalian!

Educators are quite familiar with the problems of traditional professional development – it’s often one-size-fits-all, it rarely focuses on what teachers need, and it’s really expensive. More and more, however, we’re seeing that it doesn’t have to be this way! In this piece we talk with Brian Nethero, Executive Director of the Sanford Inspire Program. Along the way, we learn about the program’s free professional development modules, how schools and teachers are using them to improve their development, and several creative uses of its curriculum.

Did you know that the average urban school misplaces nearly $20,000 worth of assets each year? And that for large schools, that sum can be twice as much? Shocking, right? You don’t have to be a budget expert to know that these sums represent a lot of money – money that could be used to hire another teacher, invest in development programs, or purchase badly needed supplies.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if nearly all of those resources could be recouped with a small investment in an intelligent asset management solution? In this piece, we talk with an education startup that’s on a mission to do exactly that!

A mirage is something that appears real or possible, but is in fact illusory or without substance. It’s also the title of TNTP’s report on teacher development, aptly named because of the widely held (yet mistaken) belief among education leaders that we know how to help teachers improve. In this piece, we review the report’s conclusions and recommendations. Along the way, we provide some additional perspectives that we think will allow educators to better implement the report's ideas.

To close out the week, we wanted to bring your something fun! And that's why we decided to talk to James Sanders, co-founder of Breakout EDU, about how the company's platform is helping to bring engagement into the classroom.

Breakout EDU is the classroom version of an escape room. What’s an escape room you ask? It’s a real-world game consisting of a series of timed puzzles that participants must solve in order to escape a locked room. Now it goes without saying that locking students up in a classroom isn’t going to fly. But that’s where Breakout EDU comes in! It’s a student-centered platform that uses a locked box and numerous challenges to inspire creativity and problem-solving.

“When you’re just pretending and reading Madame Bovary because everyone else reads it . . . Who cares! That’s SO boring. Ooh, and now we’re reading Hamlet. And this is the place where we get to talk about Polonius. Stale. It’s absolutely stale. And no real learning will take place in an environment like that.”

These are just a few of the thoughts Matthew Patterson, winner of last year’s TNTP Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice, offered to us on how he selects literature in his classroom. We recently had a chance to chat with Mr. Patterson, and in the process, ended up having an unbelievably fascinating (and hilarious) conversation on how to design curriculum. Enjoy!

Having a strong facilities strategy often means having extra dollars for educating students. And that’s never a bad thing. But the vision and planning this requires is often overlooked. So for this piece we decided to talk with Malka Borrego, Founder and CEO of the Equitas Academy network, on how she plans for and executes on her facilities strategy. The examples she provides are an excellent indication of the long-term thinking required to successfully navigate such decisions.

Bird Brain Science is a one-stop shop where science teachers can find standards-aligned passages and articles that are tiered to meet each student’s reading level. It aims to bridge the gap between the curricular goals and objectives of a science classroom and the reality of students’ reading and comprehension skills.

And it was created by Brendan Finch, who taught in a middle school science classroom for several years. After seeing how effective differentiated science passages were for his own students, Brendan knew he was onto something . . .

According to Hrag, people’s understanding of how culture works is flipped. A lot of people think a school’s culture is predicated on academic excellence, but it’s quite the opposite. Academic excellence is predicated on student and school culture. That also means that systems in many schools are set-up to prioritize the wrong thing. Most schools are so focused on performance, they ask questions like: “How do we get the test scores we want” or “What assessments do we need to create?” But unless you have instilled in children the fundamental attitude of “I want to learn” they’re never going to meet your expectations. Read on to learn how Hrag thinks about strong student culture!