“This moment in time is like no other,” reports psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis,” says Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the adolescent and school health program at the Centers for Disease Control. “We don’t have enough therapists to care for all these kids,” adds Dr. Victor Fornari, the vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry for Northwell Health, New York’s largest health system. Many writers and researchers point to the rise of smartphones and social media as the primary source for our teenage mental health crisis. (In an opinion piece, Ross Douthat blames “social liberalism,” describing “less family stability and weak attachments to religion, with a strong emphasis on self-creation and a strong hostility to ‘normativity’”.) Melinda Wenner Moyer interviews Dr. Lisa Damour on what parents need to know, do, and understand, explaining the importance of helping teens manage feelings and use strategies that bring them relief. Damour makes a distinction between what is uncomfortable versus unmanageable for them, advocating for parent curiosity and empathy at home (in what administrators may find to be a helpful parent-education piece). What about schools? Are we supporting students with curiosity and empathy, strategies, and therapists? What is a school’s purview when it comes to mental health and wellness? Recent years have shown a surge in emphasis on social-emotional learning in independent schools and a willingness to inquire about what leads students to feel connected. According to Dr. Ethier, such attention is critical: “Young people who feel connected in middle school and high school 20 years later have better mental health, are less likely to be perpetrators or victims of violence, are less likely to use substances, and are less likely to attempt suicide. So school connectedness is a very powerful protective factor.”

Five Ways to Support the Well-Being of School Leaders highlights five strategies that can help promote the well-being and success of school leaders. Implementing these strategies can help promote social-emotional well-being, fight burnout, and improve the quality of education and support for students. The authors remind us that the job demands of leaders “can lead to exhaustion, and burnout syndrome – a state of mental and physical exhaustion any worker can experience when work demands exceed personal resources.” Further, “If principals do not attend to their own well-being to counteract its negative mental, social, emotional, and physical health effects, their coworkers may be at risk for the same negative effects.” These five strategies – supporting self-care, incorporating well-being into professional development, promoting coaching and mentoring, using policies to promote well-being, and creating stability through longer-term leadership assignments – train leaders effectively while reducing the chances of burnout. The effect that school leaders have is heightened when reflecting on the practices of constituencies around them. Leaders tend to create an identity that seeps through the rest of the school, and if education is to be a laboratory, wellness and healing come first. Creating conditions that promote wellness for leaders will pay dividends in wellness across the school. The article gives decision-makers an entry point to finding the answers to solving for high turnover, where it exists, and creating opportunities to keep themselves and others healthy and effective.

How can we deal with our toughest problems in the workplace and personally? How can we develop our most creative solutions? In their book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, authors Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis offer insights into the world of paradoxes, i.e., contradictory yet interdependent elements that exist over time. How do we balance home and work life? How does a school maintain current strengths while leading innovation? Smith and Lewis offer ways to identify and group paradoxes. And they provide an approach to thinking about and addressing them whether they exist at an individual, intergroup, or organizational level in any industry. Schools, of course, face paradoxes at all levels, and either/or thinking can lead to division and stalemate. Smith and Lewis suggest ways to approach dilemmas that can yield creative solutions that connect and energize. As school community members embrace challenges – about general strategic thinking, diversity statements, curriculum, or mountains of other possibilities – a both/and approach may help reduce tensions and create new possibilities.

The title of this podcast is indeed the truth, and even that doesn't get at the sheer delight, awe, and urgency embedded in this conversation. Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, among other titles, is a treasury of insights big and small, and Klein is an adept interviewer, weaving his own journey as a reader and as a parent into the conversation in ways that bring in the listener. Wolf is the star of the show, though, and her sense of wonderment at our ability to read and her sense of concern about what is happening to that ability are essential themes for today's educators. Wolf delves into neuroscience and cognitive science, explaining just what is going on in adult minds when reading and what happens to children's minds as they learn to read, while also giving an overview of research into the effects of screens and digital text on readers' ability to focus and to absorb information from reading. For educators looking to better understand literacy and reading, this podcast is insightful and revealing; for educators looking for practical tips for navigating the complexities of literacy in the digital era, this podcast is informative and clarifying; and for educators looking to be inspired by the magic of reading and the written word, this podcast is essential.

The Shift to Student-Led, the new book by Caitlin R. Tucker and Katie Novak, is a toolkit designed both to improve students’ executive functioning and to return to educators some sorely-needed time. The latter can come through a commitment to shift many practices that are traditionally teacher-owned to opportunities for leadership and critical skill building for our students. Each chapter identifies a key area of opportunity – such as a transition from teacher assessment to self-assessment, or from teachers initiating parent communication to students owning conversations with home about their progress – where teachers tend to use up a lot of their bandwidth, and where students could gain invaluable skills by taking more responsibility in the process. While the book’s ideas alone have the capacity to be transformative for schools and educators, its resources and tools, embedded into each proposed workflow shift, are most useful. There are strategies for putting each workflow into practice based on research, as well as templates and reflection questions, all provided to make implementation as light of a lift as possible. Whether you’re a school leader or a teacher, this book will help you to identify key ways to win back some time while simultaneously increasing student leadership and ownership over our learning communities.

"Why wait until great staff leave to find out how we can motivate them to stay?" Focused particularly on school technology staff, authors Robert Sidford and Dr. Lisa Gonzales note that understaffed tech teams not only impact the smooth operations of the school but also directly affect teaching and learning support when teachers encounter tech issues that can't be addressed promptly. One solution the authors put forth is the "stay interview." Modeled on the traditional exit interview, this human-centered design process seeks to uncover data that can reveal positive factors currently supporting job satisfaction, pain points where interventions could help lead to higher retention among employees, and ways that schools can recruit and retain tech staff from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in tech fields. The authors share the "stay interview" experience of the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, including their process, interview questions, findings, and recommended best practices. While the article cites an example from a large, public school district, independent schools can tailor a "stay interview" experience to their own communities. Whether seeking to retain teachers, technology teams, or other operational staff, school leaders can apply these listening and design exercises to move beyond employee surveys and find new insights to build and retain strong faculty and staff teams.

Known widely for unforgettable fiction, Margaret Atwood’s distinctive and often disrupting voice can also be heard in Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004 – 2021. In this new collection, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments brings her famous focus to the issues that are dearest to her right now – feminism, climate crisis, human rights, gender, race, writing, politics, and pandemics. Along the way, she infuses unexpected humor and a deeply compelling view of humanity which is both accepting and yearning for better. Without a single doubt, this is not a book to be read in one sitting. Each chapter causes pause and invites reflection. As such, this volume will stand the test of time and place, as useful for Monday’s class on literature, the arts, modern history, or media studies as it will be for years to come for those who can make a difference by understanding more and asking the hard questions. How can we live on our planet? How slippery is the slope? Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How much of ourselves can we give away without vanishing? The title reference to igniting thinking through questions is apt and open. There are fewer answers than there are assurances that building knowledge and honoring reflection are always worth the time and effort that each takes. Atwood has triumphed in providing us with a rare and nourishing feast of food for thought.