Giving Compass' Take:

• Michael J. Petrilli at Education Next writes on how we can employ educational coaches to help improve learning tactics and support our students on an intricate level. 

• What can state and local leaders ask when trying to implement a high quality curriculum or other evidence-based practices? How can we most effectively chose instructional coaches?

• Here's an article on investing in evidence-based early childhood programs. 

Whether initiated from the bottom-up or the top-down, any effort to help educators align their practice with the best evidence is going to succeed or fail on the strength of its implementation. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio wrote recently:

Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a talent-development and human capital-strategy, not an accountability play. Forcing changes in behavior, whether through lawmaking or lawsuit, may win compliance, but it doesn’t advance understanding and sophistication. Teachers need to understand the “why” behind evidence-based practice to implement it well and effectively.

He’s right, of course. But how can schools and systems actually do this—build capacity, and teachers’ understanding in a way that will alter what they actually do in their classrooms?

Read the full article about the heroes of the golden age of educational practice by Michael J. Petrilli at Education Next.