Health Insurance / I Will Screw This Up
by Dina Strasser · Published 11/23/2025 · Last modified 11/24/2025
While it’s very tempting to put lesson planning, copier toner, and grading far above taking a dive into teacher health insurance, Dina Strasser is here to tell you that it is one of most important things you can do as an educator – worth at least two of your planning periods or more.
Megan Kelly finds it pretty amazing that we can make small adjustments to our lessons and help our students’ brains focus and work more efficiently. In recent years she’s added a range of consolidation strategies to her classes to do just that. Here are four of her favorites.
One of the biggest challenges facing school leaders is pushback from teachers and staff that goes beyond the kind of disagreement that can be resolved through civil discourse and compromise. Consultants Ron Williamson and Barbara Blackburn share tips for managing toxic staff.
Teacher leader Kasey Short lays out a convincing argument that educators can use middle grades and YA fiction to build background knowledge and make curricular connections across the content areas. She includes teaching strategies, guiding questions and book suggestions.
Learning scientist Karin Hess shows how STOP and THINK activities taught through collaboration and critical thinking before, during, and after each lesson can build a deeper, more meaningful understanding of skills and concepts than traditional end-of-class exit cards.
Helping math students doesn’t mean showing them the next step – it means giving them the confidence and space to find it. If our goal is to create independent problem solvers, we cannot always be the ones doing the solving, writes teaching coach Mona Iehl, author of Word Problem Workshop.
Kathie Palmieri’s fifth graders loved her gummy bear activity. It transformed a standard lab into an opportunity for authentic inquiry. It shows that even the simplest materials can lead to big scientific thinking – especially when paired with a question that invites wonder.
There’s something pleasingly counter-cultural about going analog with map construction, writes teacher Stephanie Farley. It helps students make connections they wouldn’t otherwise make, provides an entry point to deep conversations, and invites them to exercise their creativity.
Self-trust isn’t something school leaders can just turn on or off. It’s a skill they build through conscious action. Veteran educator and leadership author Jen Schwanke shares her “skill and will” model of personal trust-building with four action steps leaders can take today.
Whose job is it to teach students what they need to know about deceptive social media, algorithmic advertising, and deep-fake artificial intelligence? Media literacy educator Frank W. Baker offers advice, resources, and a sense of urgency “in an increasingly deep-fake world.”
