Educators at a high school in Virginia have adopted a comprehensive approach to helping students with cognitive delays prepare for jobs and to live independently. In this commentary, Amy Schuiteboer, one of the district's school improvement specialists, shares seven ways to make the approach successful, including using a holistic strategy, engaging the community and using data.

It can be difficult to navigate classroom civics lessons during a time of political division, asserts National Board Certified Teacher Heather Van Benthuysen. In this blog post, she shares resources and ideas for teaching civics and suggests seeking examples of civics lessons within the community.

A stranger recently told Los Angeles Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez to "speak English" to her 4-year-old daughter. Bermudez writes in this commentary about the choices her family has made to benefit her daughter -- she communicates with the child in Spanish, Bermudez's first language, while her husband speaks in Armenian as they raise their multilingual daughter, who also speaks English and is learning French.

High-school students across Vermont are gaining real-life experiences and learning about local careers as part of a work-based learning initiative that aims to keep students in the state after graduation. At one area high school, students learned lessons in math and science by visiting a goat farm.

Most school districts don't have a policy about what personal information teachers should share with their students, says Julie Underwood, a professor of education law, policy and practice at the University of Wisconsin, but she suggests teachers share age-appropriate information with a pedagogical purpose. This issue has come under scrutiny since a Texas teacher was fired after parents complained it was inappropriate for her to share a photo of her same-sex partner.

Microsoft has acquired Flipgrid, a video-sharing platform used as a social and emotional learning system by more than 20 million educators, students and their families worldwide. Microsoft has announced the program will continue to work across all platforms and now will be free to schools.

Computational thinking skills, such as abstraction and pattern recognition, can be used in project-based lessons to boost student learning across the curriculum, writes computational thinking program manager Eli Sheldon. In this blog post, he gives examples of how such thinking can be applied to English and social studies classes.

About 1 in 5 public-school teachers are supplementing their income by working a second job, according to data from the 2015-16 National Teacher and Principal Survey conducted by the US Department of Education. A separate analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that teachers were 30% more likely than workers in other fields to have outside employment.

Flexible classroom spaces are as important as other environmental factors, such as light and temperature, in improving academic outcomes for students, according to a study by researchers at the University of Salford, in England. Researchers considered data from 153 classrooms in 27 schools across the country.

More than 400 students from 70 countries attend Le Rosey, a renowned boarding school in Switzerland. This article describes the school's schedule, activities available to students and its focus on art, music and technology.