Robyn Neilsen, a former high-school English teacher who writes a blog on teacher mental health, offers four tips for educators on creating healthy work-life boundaries. Neilsen advises teachers to let go of the idea of a perfect classroom, schedule personal time, build in daily check-ins and use simple teaching systems to prevent burnout.

Concise, open-ended questions that end cleanly at the question mark and refrain from adding extra ideas or choices are key to eliciting valuable and unexpected insights, writes Shane Snow, an author and leadership expert. We ask wordy questions that suggest answers as a way to make ourselves and others more comfortable, Snow notes, but it reduces the possibility of learning something new.

The New York City Teaching Fellows program has started issuing payments to participants after weeks of delays that have caused financial hardship for nearly 1,000 participants. The program, which trains individuals to fill positions in public schools, saw a significant increase in participants this year due to a new state class size mandate, and the city attributed the delay to a change in payment structure designed to comply with tax regulations.

The Martin County School District in Florida has joined a mass-action lawsuit against major social media companies, including Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, alleges these platforms use addictive algorithms targeting children. More than 1,700 districts nationwide have joined the suit, which is set for trial in early 2026.

Houston ISD will install self-checkout kiosks in school libraries for the 2025-26 school year to comply with Texas' READER Act, which requires parental access to their child's library records. The kiosks will be integrated with the Access It Library Management system, allowing students to independently check out books and improving circulation tracking.

Amid political tensions, educators are turning to programs like Utah Valley University's Constitutional Literacy Institute and the Center for Civic Education's We the People curriculum for tools to teach civics without partisanship. Civic education can also help students build skills such as speaking and writing that are seen as essential for both democracy and literacy. "We're seeing an opportunity to show that if you do civics well, you will hit those literacy outcomes," said Donna Phillips, president and CEO of the Center for Civic Education.