Celina Pierrottet remembers 2016 as the year when she and her colleagues at the middle school where they taught noted a pointed change among their students.

“We were just like, ‘Is it just me, or are kids really nervous?’” Pierrottet recalls. “That year we had a lot of kids who were displaying some sort of school avoidance and other behaviors that we hadn't quite seen as much. I remember my colleagues and I looking at each other like, ‘It's more this year’ — and then fast forward to the pandemic.”

The rise in mental health needs among students following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the U.S. Surgeon General to declare a youth mental health crisis, and the federal government has rolled out billions of dollars since then to help schools respond.

But Pierrottet, who now works as associate director of student wellness at the National Association of State Boards of Education, noted in a policy brief a major hurdle in getting students the help they need: an inadequate supply of mental health professionals, specifically those credentialed to work in schools.

Here’s what she found is standing in the way — and how states are finding solutions.

Slim Pickings

One issue is that growing the number of mental health professionals in schools takes time. Investments made into increasing the pipeline now won’t see results — in the form of hireable mental health workers — for several years.

During Pierrottet’s research, she found that officials on Nevada’s State Board of Education noted in April of last year that the state’s prep programs for mental health professionals only graduate 12 people each year. At the time, the state had a shortage of 2,863 school mental health professionals.

“It continues to be a challenge because it’s a profession that requires advanced coursework,” Pierrottet says. “No one’s saying they need to change those requirements, but it’s a slow investment.”

There’s also the need to ensure that school mental health professionals — be they school psychologists, social workers or counselors — reflect the demographics of the students they serve, she adds. One of the challenges is that, like their classroom teacher colleagues, mental health professionals-in-training have to complete hundreds of unpaid practicum hours.

Pierrottet points to Virginia and Ohio as examples of states that have responded to that hurdle by creating programs that pay graduate students studying mental health care to work in schools. The 2019 program in Virginia “placed graduate students in school district positions and provided 200 trainees with financial incentives to work in schools,” according to her report, and Ohio has a similar, decades-old program for school psychologist interns.

“Slow and steady wins the race here in making sure that schools are attracting candidates that are diverse, that meet the diverse needs of their students,” Pierrottet says.

Managing the Workload

But the immediate mental health needs have created crushing workloads for counselors.

Pierrottet writes in her policy paper that national trade organizations recommend student-to-professional ratios of 1:250 for school social workers, 1:250 for school counselors and 1:500 for school psychologists.

There’s a long way to go to ease workloads for all three types of positions. No states meet the recommended ratio for social workers, while Pierrottet found only New Hampshire and Vermont have better caseloads than the recommendations for counselors. For school psychologists, only Idaho and Washington D.C. do better than the recommended ratio.

Some states have gotten creative to increase the availability of mental health professionals in their schools, like turning to telehealth for counseling services.

It’s not just school staff anymore who are alerting counselors that students need mental health support. One of the forces driving the increased demand for services is simply that students are asking for them, she notes, as evidenced by the federal School Pulse Panel. The most recent results show that 69 percent of schools report an increase in students looking for mental health support since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“Schools are saying there's actually just a growing demand for more mental health services in schools from students themselves who are just expressing more anxiety in schools,” Pierrottet says. “Sometimes it can be an issue if students are saying, ‘I need this,’ but they can't get that connection in the school or maybe even outside of the school.”

Footing the Bill

A win for increasing staff levels is that states have gotten funding for school mental health services from massive federal cash infusions, Pierrottet says, like $188 million from the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The U.S. Department of Education projects that one of its grants will lead to more than 14,000 more mental health professionals in schools, according to the policy paper, and new federal guidelines are making it easier for schools to bill mental health services to Medicaid rather than pulling money from their own budgets.

That doesn’t mean that getting states to fund mental health services has been easy. Yet Pierrottet says that the programs she highlights in her report have benefited from states having what one analysis called an “all-time high” of financial cushion due to budget surpluses — a result of factors including COVID-19 relief funds and higher-than-expected tax revenue. States like Michigan and Texas — both of which are looking at billions in surplus dollars — this year — are putting some of those funds toward mental health spending. Michigan has hired more than 2,700 full-time licensed behavioral health providers in schools since 2019, the report highlights, while Texas has set aside $280 million for telehealth counseling in schools starting in 2024.

“I think that right now there has been more success than in previous years because of this crisis, right?” Pierrottet offers. “It would be more difficult if there wasn't a surplus right now in the budget. I think right now, the stars are aligning. There is will, there's motivation, and so at least in the last year there was some movement toward funding.”

Pierrottet added that it’s important not to think about students’ mental health needs as something that can be solved with funding alone. Rather, she described it as an issue that needs to be addressed from multiple sides. For example, some teachers are enthusiastic about getting more training about how to support student mental health, she says, and those teachers likewise need support for their own mental well-being in order to be effective in the classroom.

“It's important to think of this holistically,” she says. “When students are healthy and when they're not having these anxious feelings, they're present, they're able to learn. So it's important for state leaders to think of this as not just, ‘Oh, we need to provide more mental health staff.’ It's about the whole continuum, the comprehensive school mental health system, and looking at it through a whole child” lens.

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

For high school students in search of a career pathway that combines the challenges of building a floating city with the difficulty of launching a rocket into space, there’s a relatively little-known college major that might float their boat — naval architecture.

Naval architecture first caught our attention in 2022, when it appeared in an EdSurge analysis of federal data about high-earning college majors. It stuck out among a slew of programs in the technology and medical fields. Then naval architecture topped our list of majors that yield high starting salaries for low-income students. (The U.S. Department of Education made a change in 2023 by classifying naval architecture in tandem with the related field of marine engineering.)

We set out to find out why a college major that pays dividends for students seemingly doesn’t have much name recognition.

What Is Naval Architecture, Anyway?

Naval architects are responsible for the entire design of a ship, says David J. Singer, the undergraduate program chair of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, marine engineers are focused on the engine room.

“The reason it's called ‘naval architecture’ is because the profession existed thousands of years ago, before the word ‘engineer’ came around,” Singer explains. “And so naval architecture, historically, was the hull shape. It was the architecture of the ship in terms of the whole form’s resistance, its seakeeping, its stability, its motions, its maneuverability.”

The types of jobs students can get with a naval architecture degree vary widely, he says. They can specialize in the construction of military ships; go into oil and gas or renewable energy; design luxury cruise ships; pursue maritime law, research and development; or work for regulators that ensure ships are constructed safely.

“If you want to be in charge of something huge at a young age, like a multibillion-dollar program, and work on the cutting-edge hardest problems, then you go work for the Navy at one of the warfare centers” as a civilian, Singer says. “If you want more of that corporate trajectory and make a little bit more money, you go defense contractor. It's one of the few professions that truly is global by nature, and that provides huge opportunities.”

The job of a naval architect is, perhaps unsurprisingly, important to the U.S. Coast Guard. Elizabeth “Elisha” Garcia is a professor in the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s naval architecture and marine engineering department. She says that understanding how to salvage ships is a big part of a naval architect’s job. That includes not just what to do with a boat that’s no longer usable, she adds, but how to safely modify boats for a new purpose — like transforming a river barge into one that can be used at sea.

“If your boat’s no longer floating upright for a variety of reasons, and you're trying to figure out what's next, are there human lives at stake that we need to get off? Are we gonna refloat the boat? Are we just gonna torpedo it and sink the boat?” Garcia says. “There's so many companies that work within that field, and they have to work with governments all around the world for that type of thing.”

Naval architects are highly sought-after, Singer says, because their expertise can’t be substituted by other types of engineers. Whether it’s a ship or oil rig, people work and live on the structures that naval architects create.

“I always tell my students that doctors can kill one person at a time. We can kill thousands, so the importance and the challenges we have are also commensurate with the dangers and the responsibility we have,” Singer explains. “I don't care if you're making an oil platform or you're making a military platform. You have lives and the environment under your purview as an engineer.”

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

If you’re a history buff, you may already know that Cleopatra had a substantial amount of rizz. King Henry VIII, on the other hand, could be considered the Tom Sandoval of his time. Meanwhile, Czar Nicholas II struggled to, well, pick a struggle.

History teacher Lauren Cella's "Gen Z Teaches History" series has earned about 30 million views on Instagram and TikTok combined.

All three of these historic royals have been the subject of “Gen Z Teaches History,” a viral video series created by Lauren Cella, who teaches 10th grade history. In it, the California educator assumes the persona of a Gen Z teacher from the future, delivering overviews of historical figures and events using a hilarious mix of opaque (if you’re a Millennial or older) slang and Taylor Swift lyrics.

“A positive compliment that I hear sometimes from my students or from people on the internet is like, ‘Oh my goodness, you make history so interesting,’” Cella explains. “And I always say, ‘History is interesting.’ I think other people make it boring. I'm not making it interesting. I'm just telling you what happened.”

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Check out our Gen Z slang dictionary below.

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What began on a lark on social media has earned Cella millions of views across TikTok and Instagram, along with the admiration of students and commenters who appreciate how much they learn from each installment.

I’ve had teachers of different ages that were able to break it down in a way that we could understand, and that made me fall in love with history. So the series is really just an homage to that.

— Lauren Cella

“Thank you for helping me get my PhD in 20th century history,” wrote a commenter about Cella’s explanation of the Cold War.

Behind the lighthearted series is Cella’s real love of history and desire to make it more accessible, just as her own teachers did for her.

“I think other people make it inaccessible,” she says. “I think other people purposely want to not tell different sides of the story, they want it to be an easier narrative, they purposely use vocabulary that only encompasses upper academia. They don't want other types of people to be able to have access to the curriculum, and that's done on purpose — especially in social studies.”

How It Started

Cella loves a good story.

It's why she studied history and journalism as an undergrad, and why teaching history appeals to her. Before that, Cella grew up hearing stories from her paternal Hawaiian grandparents — who are also of Chinese and Puerto Rican heritage, which Cella says is a common “hapa” mix of backgrounds — about their lives and the family’s history. They shared stories about what they witnessed during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and they also regaled her with the history of Puerto Rico’s indigenous Taino people.

“Then on my mom's side of the family, all the elders would tell stories about how the family came from Mexico,” Cella recalls. “From a really young age, I was really interested in Liberty's Kids and the American Girl series. I should have known I was going to be a history teacher.”

It’s a lack of connection to the past that Cella sees as a barrier to students finding their own love for history.

“A lot of these things were 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and maybe if you're reading about it from a primary source, it can be really difficult to understand,” Cella explains. “I’ve had teachers of different ages that were able to break it down in a way that we could understand, and that made me fall in love with history. So the series is really just an homage to that.”

It was Cella’s students who encouraged her to start posting history lessons online, and she finally gave it a try during the pandemic.

“I was like, ‘No, I'm too old. Nobody does that,’” Cella recalls thinking about the notion of taking to social media to teach lessons. “And they're like, ‘No, Miss, they do. You can actually learn a lot of stuff. People go on it to learn.’ So I started kind of posting more and just experimenting, and I noticed that my stories about teaching or my reels about history were getting a lot more engagement than anything else I was posting.”

Her first viral hit was a Gen Z history lesson on the Russian Revolution, which gained 1 million views on Instagram and then another million views on TikTok. Cella says that she chalked it up to luck, but then her next video on the French Revolution reached 2 million views. Subsequent history videos continued to perform well.

Most of her online audience is made up of people her age or older, Cella says. While they might not understand all of the slang, she muses, they’re drawn in by the format and pleasantly surprised to end the videos knowing more than when they started.

“Literally have never understood WW1 until right now,” a commenter wrote on her most popular TikTok video to date.

Cella likes to “trick” people into learning when they think they’re just watching a funny social media post.

“Of course, it's an oversimplification. The videos are a minute long, but it gets people interested,” she says. “I'm really just doing the same thing on TikTok and reels that every great teacher does, and that's just connecting with their students and breaking it down into a language that they could understand in a way that is inclusive and maybe a little bit fun.”

Fun can be hard to come by for teachers these days. Cella hopes that her videos offer an example to fellow educators about how, despite the difficulties of the profession, they need not always let worry dominate.

“If you're worried that you're not doing enough, you probably are. Because the good teachers that I know are always trying to do the best for our students,” she says. “So if that's where your heart is, 99 percent of the time, you're probably already doing enough.”

Behind the Scenes

There are a few recurring elements to Cella’s Gen Z history videos: She’s sitting behind a desk or podium, sunglasses perched atop her head, iced coffee in hand.

Cella says she never intended for the iced coffee in particular to become a staple of the format, but there’s no going back now. That’s because it signals a pivotal moment in her videos, when she shakes the ice-filled cup, switches hands, and introduces important context for the story with a pointed, “Meanwhile…”

“This is so embarrassing, but sometimes it takes me a few takes and the ice would melt, and then I would have water. And I'm like, ‘What do you do?’” she recounts. “I would go buy another one, but then I was all hyped up on coffee. So I have fake ice in the iced coffee now.”

Cella is a student of her time. As a high schooler, she was a fan of comedy history shows like Drunk History and Epic Rap Battles of History — series that approached dry subject matter with a comedic slant that earned them wide appeal.

But her influences now include her students, who give her ideas for new slang to incorporate and keep her up-to-date on the ever-evolving Gen Z — and now Gen Alpha — lexicon.

It was her students' frank way of speaking about the world that inspired the character Cella plays. Cella says that if she’s making fun of anyone, it’s herself and not the kids.

“The way we were taught [history] was so boring and so dry and only told one side of the story, and Gen Z is not about that,” Cella says. “So when they actually get to be the history teachers, that was the inspiration. They're going to really give us the tea, they're really going to tell us how it is.”

If colleges and universities want to close the graduation gap for their Latino students, their target goal is clear: help another 6.2 million Latinos earn a degree by 2030.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

That’s according to the think tank Excelencia in Education, which focuses on research and policy on Latino achievement in higher education.

Its analysis on the 2021 college graduation rates of Latinos highlights some dismal statistics. Compared to their white, non-Hispanic counterparts, Latinos generally graduate from college at lower rates and drop out at higher rates. That’s even as the number of Hispanic students pursuing higher education has increased over the past 15 years.

Latino and white students enroll in higher education at roughly the same rates — 21 percent for Latinos and 23 percent for white students, according to the analysis.

The gaps become evident when looking at who graduates.

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

When Mayra Valtierrez talks about the students in New Mexico public schools who are learning English, one thing becomes clear: It’s an incredibly diverse population.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

The New Mexico Public Education Department is tasked with serving not only students who have grown up speaking Spanish but also Native American children who are learning English and newcomers from other countries.

“We are a friendly state when it comes to taking any sort of refugees, or anyone who enters our state, so we have Spanish-dominant [English learner] students who come at any age, from being little to being youth,” says Valtierrez, the department’s director of language and culture. “We've been supporting some of our refugees from Afghanistan, for example, and from other places. Then we have the children of immigrants that were born here, and thus inherited a language from their family.”

Schools with English-learning students are tasked not just with ensuring that these children acquire the language but also, as with all other students, succeed academically and eventually graduate from high school.

But just how likely English learners are to graduate can vary widely depending on which state they live in.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that students who are English learners — sometimes called emergent bilinguals — generally lag behind their peers when it comes to high school graduation rates.

The data covers 10 years, starting with 2010-11 through the 2019-20 school year. The paper notes that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused difficulties for some states in collecting and reporting graduation data for the 2019-20 school year. Texas and Illinois did not provide information that year.

© VectorMine / Shutterstock

Education wonks have long raised the alarm about how school discipline is applied unequally among students of different racial and ethnic groups, with Black students facing a disproportionate number of office discipline referrals (ODRs). The effects of such practices can reverberate throughout a student’s life, according to the American Psychological Association, leading to worse mental health and lower grades.

“We know Black students are punished more frequently and more harshly, but what we didn’t really know was how much all of this discipline was shared across educators versus perpetuated by just a few educators,” says Emily K. Penner, an associate professor of education in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine.

Penner is part of a group of researchers who shed new light on this problem after they were able to pinpoint how a small number of teachers in one California district effectively doubled the discipline gap between white and Black students. The study on “frequent teacher referrers” was published in the journal Education Researcher this summer.

Jing Liu, assistant professor in education policy at the University of Maryland College Park, says that he and his fellow researchers were surprised by their findings. That’s in no small part because of what he says is a first in this field of research: access to data with a uniquely high level of detail that allowed the team to track how many office referrals were issued by individual teachers.

“It’s concerning that they’re just a small population of teachers [who are] much more likely to make a referral,” Liu says. “It points to our need to understand: Why are there such a small population of teachers making referrals, and how can we help them to stop this troubling pattern?”

The study also found that the ODR gap is being driven in particular by office referrals issued for interpersonal and defiance reasons, “which are arguably more likely to be subject to bias” compared to other less subjective circumstances, like fights.

Penner’s past policy work has examined the factors within education that harm students of certain races.

“We've just started to have this conversation about the role of educators, in particular, in school discipline,” she says. “A lot of the research about school discipline has really been on the student side, mostly thinking about outcomes for students. But really, it's not just a one-sided thing. There’s a whole institution with individuals in it that also contributes to what happens for school discipline for students.”

For Penner, the study’s findings open questions about the circumstances surrounding teachers who are high referrers. Is there a policy making them feel like they have to issue referrals, she offers, or are there particular school settings that lead to it? For instance, could their classrooms be in areas where more fights tend to break out?

The data covers four school years from fall 2016 through spring 2020 at a “large, diverse, urban-intensive school district in California,” as described in the paper. Liu says district leaders approached researchers with the data because of their desire to investigate inequity within student discipline at the school, and the conversation around referrals began with the district department that deals with student well-being.

“From reading the literature, we quickly find that lots of research on student discipline focuses on suspension, which is the end result of the discipline processes,” Liu says. “I really think that understanding the referrals — who are making them, who are receiving those referrals — can really help us to go a step further to understand the origins, the sources, of racial disparities in school discipline.”

Who Is in the Top 5 Percent?

Taking a step back to look at all the teachers who worked at the school district during the four years captured by the data, about one-third of them sent at least one student to the office with an ODR during any given school year. About half of those teachers issued five or fewer referrals during the time frame.

Researchers analyzed the gaps in the number of office referrals issued to white students and their peers in different racial and ethnic groups. (The data did not include suspension rates, which researchers describe as a disciplinary outcome of ODRs.) They were able to see the impact of teacher “top referrers” by starting the analysis with only teachers who issued one or two office referrals, then adding teachers who issued three to five referrals to the sample, watching how the number of referrals issued to each ethnic group changed as teachers who issued higher numbers of referrals became part of the sample.

When the top 5 percent of referrers — teachers who issued 46 or more ODRs in a school year — were added to the sample, the gaps in disciplinary action between student racial groups spiked.

The top 5 percent of referring teachers were responsible for creating the widest discipline gap between Black and white students. Before they were added to the sample, the data showed that Black students were issued 1.6 ODRs for every one ODR issued to white students. After the top 5 percent of referring teachers were added, that ratio jumped to 3.4 office referrals for Black students for every one issued to white students.

Top referrers gave Black and Hispanic students an outsized share of ODRs relative to the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in their classes, according to the study.

Black students made up only 7 percent of students in the district and 12 percent of students in top-referring teachers’ classrooms. However, the analysis found Black students made up 22 percent of all students who received ODRs and 27 percent of students sent to the office by top-referring teachers.

While still disproportionate, the racial gaps were less severe between white students and students from other groups, such as Hispanic and Asian students.

Researchers also found that teachers who were white, early in their careers, and teaching at middle schools to be “the ones who engage more in extensive referring,” the study says.

“I think in middle school, there's just a lot of new routines and developmental changes that are happening for students, lots of different kinds of boundary-testing and escalated expectations in terms of self- management,” Penner says. “A disproportionate number of folks in the top 5 percent were novice teachers, so it does underscore the need for continued support and in-service preparation around classroom management, around routines for supporting disruptive students and engaging with them.”

Black and Hispanic teachers were less likely than their white colleagues to both issue an office referral and to be in the ranks of top referrers. Asian teachers were even less likely to issue a referral but were just as likely as white teachers to rank among top-referring teachers, “suggesting varied referring behavior among Asian teachers.”

Liu says when it comes to teaching experience, teachers notably rely less on office disciplinary referrals once they reach 11 years in the profession. The data shows that the number of times teachers sent students to the office began to fall once they hit three years of experience.

There’s still work to be done to understand why some teachers are reaching for office referrals so frequently.

“We think it's very possible that new teachers are coached to follow a procedure around what happens with student discipline,” Penner explains. “A more veteran teacher would kind of know how to massage the situation or react to students in a way that could de-escalate things, and a [novice] teacher might not have that in their repertoire yet.”

Next Steps

Since the publication of the study, Liu says more school district leaders have reached out to ask the researchers for a similar analysis of their office referral data, including a partnership that’s in the works with a school district in North Carolina.

As for the California district that’s the subject of the recent study, Liu says that the research team is working with the school district to identify teachers in the top 5 percent of referrers — not to punish them, but to learn what’s contributing to their high rate of ODRs and find ways to support them.

“We may need to provide more support to junior teachers, [assign them] a less challenging student body, or more target PD for those teachers,” Liu says, “but by identifying this group of teachers who are more likely to be referrers, we’re more likely to reduce the number of referrals and racial gaps.”

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Clad in a beanie, university sweatshirt and gold-rimmed glasses, a TikToker who goes by Mimi looks directly into the camera and speaks in a gentle tone as she addresses her viewers on the topics that flash in red-highlighted letters at the top of the video: “TW: Climate Anxiety & Doomism.”

The trigger warning is buttressed by a more hopeful message accentuated in green: “& TIPS on how to deal with that.”

Considering what the 24-year-old shares in the video about her experience as a climate activist and former environmental studies student in college, the need for a heads-up becomes apparent.

“As you come to the realization of how big an issue climate change is and how small it makes you feel, it really brings around this impending sense of doom,” she says. “It makes you feel super helpless, especially when you start acknowledging who gets affected.”

That is to say, people who are part of certain racial groups — likely a reference to the outsized impact climate change has on Black and Hispanic people — and low-income people. And that reality has made Mimi contemplate, “Wow, do people really think of my life as that worthless when it comes to making a buck?”

@mama_miah256 I hope this reaches the right people 🌱 #climateanxiety #environmentaljustice #climatechange #climatemovement #blackenvironmentalists #foryoupage ♬ original sound - mimi

“I ended up in undergrad having to go to therapy partially because of my acceptance of what climate change is and how little and small and in-equipped it made me feel,” she says. “And ironically my therapist said, ‘I get a lot of you environmental studies majors in here,’ and she was very happy that I came to see her.”

There are plenty of factors affecting students’ mental health these days. Continuing reverberations from pandemic-era remote learning, gun violence and social media to name a few.

There appears to be yet another to add to the list.

There are signs that soaring temperatures, monster storms and aggressive floods are taking a mental toll on students. An international “climate anxiety” survey of 10,000 teens and young adults found that more than 45 percent of those who responded said “their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.”

Climate anxiety isn’t a wholly new concept. Google saw a 565 percent increase in searches for the phrase a couple years ago.

Since then, researchers have taken closer looks at what role climate anxiety — also called climate doomism or eco-anxiety — plays in the overall mental health pressures that young people are facing.

Taking Action

Mimi is far from alone in her experiences with climate anxiety, if the myriad videos by other TikTokers on the platform talking about dealing with negative effects of the environment are any sign.

A study from the Yale School of Public Health found that climate anxiety is distinct from other mental health conditions like general anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder.

“Responses demonstrated how climate change anxiety can pose a barrier to engaging with goals typically salient in emerging adulthood such as education, career, and family-related goals, which may contribute to a loss of meaning or purpose,” researchers explain in the paper. “This may be of particular concern in the context of an emerging adult population that is already more vulnerable to mental health distress.

Yale researcher and clinical psychologist Sarah Lowe said in an Q&A earlier this year that climate anxiety tends to impact people who are already experiencing symptoms of general anxiety. Overall, Lowe explained, the number of college students who say they’re experiencing climate anxiety is fairly low.

“Our students were in the range of ‘rarely anxious’ to ‘sometimes anxious,’ and that to us was a bit surprising given what we’ve heard from students,” she said in the interview. “But it’s also important to note that the whole range of scale scores was represented in the survey results, so we did have some students who reported frequent or extreme anxiety about climate change.”

One potential source of relief for climate anxiety among youth might be doing something about climate change.

That can come in many forms. A Pew Research Center poll from 2021 found that adults in Generation Z were more likely than Americans belonging to older generations to have donated money, contacted an elected official, volunteered or attended a rally to try to help address climate change in the prior year.

The Yale survey of more than 300 undergrad and graduate students ages 18 to 35 found that students who participate in “collective action” — like involvement in advocacy groups or educating others about climate change — report lower levels of climate anxiety than those who only take part in individual actions like recycling or saving energy.

One notable recent example of youth taking collective action occurred last month, when 16 plaintiffs, ranging in age from 5 to 22, successfully won their court case claiming that state agencies in Montana were violating their constitutional right to a clean environment by allowing fossil fuel development. NPR called it “a first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S.” and one that “established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.”

For her part, TikToker Mimi encourages her followers to remember that the answer to climate change does not rest on any one person. Rather, people who want to get involved can think about how their unique talents and skills can be put to use.

“How can I make the most ripples and the most effective change in the communities I reside within?” Mimi invites them to contemplate. “And no, it may not be this huge movement or this huge thing that I’m doing, but I am contributing. And I’m holding those who are part of the problem to the utmost accountability. Do what you can with what you can.”

Designing for Climate Education

Architects designed a rainwater collection system for Springdale Park Elementary School in Atlanta, where it is used as a teaching tool for the students. Photo courtesy of Perkins&Will.

Just because children and teens are taking action doesn’t mean they think grown-ups should be absolved of responsibility. The climate anxiety international survey found that “a perceived failure by governments to respond to the climate crisis is associated with increased distress” among youth.

Getting governments to change is a big task (although not impossible, as those young Montanans learned.) So what can adults whose work is closer to the daily experiences of children do to? For example, as educators and architects grapple with the challenge of adapting school buildings to design with climate resilience in mind, can they affect students’ climate change worries as well?

That answer is yes, according to one expert.

Shivani Langer, a senior project architect and senior regenerative design adviser at the firm Perkins&Will Austin, echoes other experts who say children are more vulnerable to climate change than adults. She previously spoke to EdSurge about how architects are making school buildings more resilient to rising temperatures and other effects of climate change.

That vulnerability includes their physical development and characteristics — young children literally inhale more air pollution because they breathe faster — to the interruptions to their education from more frequent natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes.

Langer is also an expert on how buildings can impact their inhabitants’ health and well-being — having earned the rather aptly named credential of WELL accredited professional — and believes that architects can educate students and even assuage worries about climate change through their designs.

“Kids are seeing that things are happening, right? Whether it was a freeze here, or a hurricane somewhere, or a tornado somewhere,” she says. “Kids are the biggest proponent of sustainability. They understand that they will go through it because of our bad decisions over the years.”

Langer says colleagues at her company’s Atlanta firm designed a school’s rainwater collection system that is used to teach students about sustainability and gardening. Additionally, sustainability-minded architects encourage schools to include in their designs dashboard displays that show students how much energy or water is used in the building. The dashboard could be a screen near the entrance visible to students and visitors alike, she explains, or the usage data could be accessed via iPad as part of science lessons.

“We have even done competitions between different wings of schools to say, ‘Hey, how much electricity did you use?’ So in that way, they get excited about being better stewards of the environment,” Langer says. “And if we make these schools resilient and sustainable, informing and teaching through that actually helps relieve their stress, too, because they understand that there is something being done.”

© Malchevska / Shutterstock

HOUSTON — On a Tuesday in August, one day before the official start of the school year, the halls of Jefferson Early Learning Center were filled with the tinkling chatter of pre-K students who were escorted by their parents to meet the teachers.

But to reach those classrooms, families had to traverse the parking lot in the choking Texas heat, which rolled off the pavement in waves. That month, the temperature reached a record-breaking average high of 102.7 degrees.

Back inside, Glenn Jarrett pointed out features of the school building interior that might be easy for most people to overlook, but that stand out to him as the Alief Independent School District’s director of construction and facilities. Details like the use of earth tones throughout the school and light-colored wooden beams in the ceiling. Those beams support awning-like overhangs, which shield the temperature-treated glass windows of the cafeteria and the tiny, scaled-down furniture within from being beaten by direct sunlight.

In the hallway, Jarrett pointed at more windows strategically placed up high — too high for even the tallest grown-up to see through.

“You have all that light that's coming in naturally up above, and then you have the white walls that reflect it down,” Jarrett explained. He motioned to the lights overhead. “You don't even have to have those on to have light in the building.”

The LED lights are on, though, because it would make people nervous to walk around without them, he added.

The point of all these design choices is to reduce the impact of the scorching outside temperatures. They’re just a few of the ways Jarrett and other experts say excessive heat, along with other environmental issues brought on by climate change, are shifting the way schools are built and renovated.

Extreme heat waves recently caused some schools in the Northeast and Midwest to cancel classes, and rising temperatures are prompting some school districts in states like Utah to add air conditioning to campuses that didn’t need them in years past. More frequent and powerful natural disasters are adding tangible costs, too, pushing thousands more districts to shell out for insurance.

The Jefferson Early Learning Center in Houston was designed with covered walkways throughout campus to protect students, faculty and visitors from the heat. Photo courtesy of PBK.

A Long Time Coming

Dan Boggio, founder and executive chairman of national architectural firm PBK, says his company has been designing schools with extreme heat in mind for about 10 years. But it’s typically architects who bring up the need for climate-related features rather than a conversation initiated by district personnel, he adds.

“When we start a planning process for new schools and renovations, we have an entire list of things we bring forward as a result of climate change,” Boggio says, like the adoption of solar panels to cut down energy use or double-paned glass to keep out heat.

As Boggio explains how climate change has affected his firm’s approach to building schools, he describes changes that touch nearly every aspect of the process, from selection of a building site (preferably somewhere with lots of surrounding green space) to the choice of paint colors (nothing dark that will absorb heat).

“We don’t want to be in a sea of concrete, because that increases the temperature of the microenvironment — we call it a heat sink,” Boggio explains. “We’re saving more trees than ever on these sites. It used to be we would just typically mow down all the trees to get the baseball diamonds and the football practice fields in.”

Much of what Boggio describes about new construction and renovation deals points to a singular goal: reflect as much heat as possible.

His architects are using what he calls “high-performance glass,” once reserved for high-rise buildings, on schools to cut down on solar radiation. School attics are renovated with reflective material that will keep heat from penetrating further down. Brick buildings that are 70 or 80 years old are painted with an elastomeric coating — i.e., rubbery paint — to reflect sunlight that would normally be absorbed by the masonry and create what Boggio calls a “heat battery.”

The buildings themselves and mechanical equipment are being built higher up to protect them from flooding. In Texas, for example, “it used to be that we had to have them out of the 100-year floodplain; now they have to be a certain distance higher,” Boggio says. And for equipment that sits outside, like condensers, “we're raising them up on racks because [of] the increased amount of flooding that is a direct result of climate change.”

Windows at the Jefferson Early Learning Center are shielded from direct sunlight by overhangs. Wood was selected as the material for support beams to reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the school building. Photo courtesy of PBK.

Sites for Resiliency

Beyond their primary use for day-to-day education, schools are also likely to be used as either cooling centers or natural disaster shelters, Boggio adds, which means they need to be outfitted with bigger generators that can offer residents a reprieve from extreme heat in case of a power outage — not simply preserve thousands of dollars worth of food as was expected in years past.

Designing schools that can serve as what architects call “resiliency hubs'' could play a crucial role in protecting vulnerable communities from extreme weather, says Shivani Langer, a senior project architect and senior regenerative design adviser at the firm Perkins&Will Austin. She mentioned the deadly winter storm that knocked out power across Texas in 2021 as an example of a time when such a hub could benefit a whole town.

“Especially in this country, there is always a public school in every community, and the elementary schools are pretty close in distance to where the people live,” Langer says. “Why can't one school, at least, in each community be that place of shelter? If we do that, then we truly will serve all the communities, not just the communities that have the resources to get a true hub that can survive in a climate disaster.”

The design considerations of school-based resiliency hubs would center on keeping the people inside comfortable in the climate conditions of that particular community, Langer explains. In the case of extreme heat, that might mean having sufficient backup power to cool the building during a power outage or being able to collect condensation from the air conditioning system to run sinks and toilets during a water outage. A school cafeteria might even be designed with an exterior window counter, Langer says, where people could walk up and be served meals after a disaster.

Even as architects recommend climate-minded designs, the cost of implementing them can be a deterrent for school districts.

“It's all about survivability, which does mean power backup — which can be expensive,” Langer says. “That's why I think it needs to be something that, as a community, has to be decided.”

For example, she explains, a school district may opt to climate-proof only certain schools, rather than every single possible building. That’s not to say that schools are doing nothing if they don’t have a resiliency hub, she adds. Rather, they may be taking steps like making buildings more energy efficient or choosing landscaping that requires less water, which are better for the environment.

Ultimately, Langer says, it’s important to keep in mind that schools are designed for a vulnerable population: the children who will deal with the effects of climate change throughout their lives. She believes that better school design can be a teaching tool that encourages youth to be better stewards of the environment as they grow up.

“I know we rely a lot on the teachers to do the job for us, but as designers of education facilities, I think we have a big responsibility to also be the teachers for the users that will occupy our buildings,” she says. “These buildings are designed for 50 to 100 years. They are gonna see thousands and thousands of students. So our decisions are very important.”

Keeping the Heat at Bay

At Jefferson Early Learning Center, one of the school district’s newest buildings, adaptations to the heat and risk of flood are woven throughout the design. The large green space on the campus’ right side is planted with native grasses, a project done in partnership with the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy, and it will serve as a retention pond during heavy rains to fight off flooding, explains Jarrett, the district facilities leader.

Jarrett says there are other signs of the rising heat’s impact on schools in the district. The synthetic turf on the high school football field, which at times got as hot as 120 degrees, was replaced at the end of its lifecycle with new turf that didn’t hold onto heat. School visitors won’t find metal slides on playgrounds anymore, he points out, and wooden coverings have replaced canvas coverings as the need to shade students during outdoor activities became more permanent.

Outdoor temperatures have gotten so hot, Alief ISD Police Chief Dan Turner says, that dogs in his K-9 unit have to wear booties to protect their paws from scalding pavement.

Some of the biggest climate-related design changes have been to schools’ heating and cooling systems, says Jeff Delisle, Jarrett’s colleague at the school district and director of maintenance and operations. The systems were once built with the understanding that the highest average temperature outside would be 95 degrees, Delisle explains, but that standard has been increased to 100 degrees.

The black rubber roofs of 20 years ago are gone, he adds, replaced by white painted roofs and double the insulation.

“People that are much smarter than us have seen this coming for a long time,” Delisle says. “It’s the reason energy [standards] have been changing every six or seven years to get more and more stringent in terms of how we're going to conserve energy, how we're going to heat and cool our buildings, how we can do that in a way that's most efficient.”

There are likely droves of educators who find themselves wishing they could take a peek inside their students’ minds to find out, “What the heck are you thinking?”

Some of those answers were made available last month when the Boys & Girls Clubs of America released its annual survey of kids and teens ages 9 to 18. The organization says that more than 130,000 young people at nearly 3,500 clubs around the country took part in the survey.

While there are generally some limitations when it comes to asking people to rate their own strengths and weaknesses — i.e. the temptation to pick the “right” answer — the survey reveals how kids view themselves and their desires for the future. They were asked to agree or disagree with statements about college and career plans, how they’re faring in school and with their mental health, among other topics.

Life After High School

Educators, employers, policymakers and others have been fretting over enrollment declines at colleges and whether students see the same value in a university diploma as their predecessors. In one recent example, thousands of high school students received a community college admission letter without ever applying in a bid by the State University of New York to attract potential freshmen.

Among the Boys & Girls Clubs of America kids, survey participants overwhelmingly had college aspirations, with 75 percent expecting to continue their education beyond high school.

Thirty percent said they want a bachelor’s degree, and another 26 percent plan to pursue a master’s or other advanced degrees. Amongst the high school seniors, most reported having applied to trade school, community college or a university along with federal financial aid.

The survey also took measure of kids’ interests in science, technology, education and math. Students by and large said they were excited by and successful in math and science, with 47 percent of reporting they agreed or strongly agreed they wanted a STEM career and 52 percent saying they know the “steps a student needs to take if they want to be in a science-related career.”

They also appear to be confident in their knowledge of how to reach their career goals and the accompanying price tag. Among high school juniors and seniors, more than 90 percent said they know what kind of education or vocational training they will need for the jobs they want and how much those plans will cost.

It’s an impressive stat considering the well-documented stressors that grads older than these youngsters who are yoked with student loan debt are facing, like worries about repayment or buying homes.

Despite the positive outlook, only 51 percent of participants in fifth through 12th grade said they were on track to graduate. Twenty-one percent said they were “on track with some risk,” while the remaining 28 percent said they were not on track to graduate from high school.

Are the Kids Alright?

It’s undoubtedly been a stressful few years for kids, and they’re still in the midst of what experts called a national youth mental health crisis. Schools and community groups alike are trying to figure out how to meet the demand for more mental health support among students, and crisis lines have reported an uptick in teens reaching out for help.

But the survey participants generally saw themselves as mentally strong.

About a two-thirds of the kids said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they can stay calm when stressed, and nearly half said they know how to calm themselves down.

Around 60 percent of students said it was “very true” that they can identify the emotions they feel and how their feelings influence their actions. Sixty-four percent believe it’s “very true” that they can accomplish most things if they try their best, and about the same amount said they don’t give up on something when they have trouble with a task.

They were also positive when it came to making mistakes. Just over 90 percent said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they try to figure out how to do better next time when something important in their lives goes wrong.

However, their responses revealed something more concerning when statements were phrased more negatively.

Forty percent said it was “very true” — and 30 percent said it was “sort of true” — that, “when something goes wrong in my life, I just can’t stop worrying about it.”

Another 38 percent said it was “very true” — 29 percent said it was “sort of true” — that they try to keep people from finding out when something goes wrong in their life.

Cool to Be Kind

Kids reported a fairly sunny outlook on their relationships and communities, responding positively to questions about how they treat others and their feelings about their community.

More than 90 percent said they try to help when they see someone in need or help when “I see someone having a problem.” Another 85 percent said they try to think about how others will be impacted by their decisions, and about the same percentage said they are good at making friends.

More than 80 percent of kids say they believe they can make a difference in their communities.

But on the receiving end of others’ behavior, 40 percent of kids said they had been bullied at school during the past year (62 percent of those students also said they told an adult). Another 18 percent said they had been “electronically bullied,” and those kids were less likely to tell an adult — 45 percent said they did.

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

When Gorgette Green-Hodnett wrapped up her 23-year career in K-12 education a couple years ago, her family members celebrated. Not only with well wishes for her new job coordinating an academic support program at a university in Maryland, but also with relief that she would no longer be working around the clock.

Her family had been glad each time she’d had a non-teaching role throughout her career, but this time her husband was excited at the prospect of finally taking a vacation outside the summer months.

“What I was told by my family is, ‘Thank God, because you come home and you grade papers. We have to go to your school and help you,’” she says. “I didn’t even realize the impact the work was having on my immediate family. Consciously or unconsciously, I allowed my work to manage and almost overtake areas of my life.”

That’s the kind of realization that teachers were coming to during the pandemic, Green-Hodnett says, when they were stretched to their limits juggling remote learning, their families, health concerns, and every other stressor brought on by the spread of COVID-19. While the country didn’t see the sudden mass exodus of teachers that some feared, the toll appeared clear — teachers reported experiencing depression at three times the rate of other adults.

And there was significant turnover in the workforce. A recent analysis by Chalkbeat found that, between the 2021 and 2022 school years, eight states — Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington — faced their highest teacher turnover rates in the past five years. Hawaii experienced a spike in retirements during the 2020-21 school year. And a recent Louisiana Educator Workforce Snapshot revealed that 26 percent of teachers who left their jobs in the 2020-2021 academic year had 21 or more years of experience.

Teacher quitting was at a 10-year high in 2021, consulting firm McKinsey & Company reports, and increased again in 2022. Quitting accounted for 61 percent of job “separations” among teachers in 2021, according to the data, and jumped to 64 percent in 2022.

Losing any teacher has ripple effects throughout a school, from eroding the sense of community to a potential knock on students’ academic progress.

But what happens, more specifically, when veteran teachers burn out and decide it’s time to say goodbye, walking out the door with all of their hard-earned experience? And what can schools change to get them to stay?

‘Ripple Effects’

When it comes to years of teaching experience, federal data divides U.S. teachers into four buckets. In the 2020-21 school year:

• 12.4 percent of teachers had three or less years
• 24.5 percent of teachers had four to nine years
• 16.6 percent had 10 to 14 years
• 46.5 percent had 15 or more years

That breakdown is similar to what it was three years earlier in the 2017-18 school year.

Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: National Center for Education Statistics

But for some teachers who have been in the profession for a long time, it feels like there has been a shift.

Around the time she moved on to higher education, Green-Hodnett was running the Real Talk, Real Time Educators Forum with fellow educator Chandra Joseph-Lacet, who is a new teacher instructional coach for Boston Public Schools. The Facebook group and podcast were sounding boards for teachers looking for a community amidst the hair-pulling stress of remote learning.

Struggling with mental health is nothing new for teachers, Green-Hodnett says, but the pandemic made it — and many crumbling edges and simmering inequities of the education system — visible to the outside public in a new way.

In Joseph-Lacet’s view, the praise heaped upon teachers in the early days of the pandemic hasn't translated into meaningful plans to help them manage the stress and pressure of the job. That’s partly why the duo created their podcast and forum — they were both in roles that supported teachers but they didn’t see a larger conversation about their mental health emerge.

“Everybody’s talking about teachers, but nobody’s talking to teachers,” Joseph-Lacet recalls thinking. “What are we going to do to protect and to heal ourselves? In a profession, and quite frankly, in a world that never really has valued teachers in the way that they really should have.”

For some experienced teachers, the answer was simple: Leave.

Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: Louisiana Department of Education

Teachers who have seen it all can bring a steady assurance to a staff team. Without them, schools can feel less stable.

“What happens when you don’t have folks with those years of expertise, someone who can help with, ‘I don’t understand this lesson, can you help me?’” Joseph-Lacet explains, “you see this withering of the environment in ways that you didn’t see before. This constant feeling of turnover because there’s no holding of the guard by the people who used to be there.”

Other experienced teachers don’t walk away, but hang on despite suffering from burnout. That, too, can have a negative ripple effect on their colleagues’ morale.

“A 10-year teacher is like the kingpin, because people are not staying in the profession like when we were younger,” Green-Hodnett says. “The veteran teachers are juggling all kinds of things because they also want good work. It’s this triangulation of trying to maintain themselves, manage classrooms that are not properly balanced in terms of what students need, and manage children who are not prepared emotionally” to follow directions.

While the pandemic exacerbated the external pain points, there’s also another culprit to the stress veteran teachers experience. There’s a certain self-sacrificing attitude that teachers have had for a long time now, Joseph-Lacet says, that comes from the expectations of their peers, administrators, all the way back to their training days in college. It’s the idea that, from the time that school starts in the fall to the final bell in summer, their lives revolve totally around work.

“I was guilty of saying, ‘Tell your friends you’ll see them in June,’” Joseph-Lacet says of conversations she used to have with new teachers.

She thinks of that attitude now as modeling bad behavior — total lack of self-care or work-life balance, in this case — something that veteran teachers are still at risk of doing as they deal with mental strain.

It all adds up to a sense that a lasting career in education is a tenuous prospect — or one that requires teachers who stick it out to give, and give, and give until there’s nothing left.

After all, Joseph-Lacet says that what earns teachers the reputation of being a “veteran” has changed during her career, from someone with 20 years of experience to someone who’s been in the profession for just three years.

Who Takes Care of Experienced Teachers?

A study of the impact of COVID-19 and its stressors on New Orleans teachers found that, when asked what the most helpful support during pandemic teaching had been, 42 percent of responders said “support from coworkers.”

We have to take care of the human being who is holding it together — or it’s all gonna crash.

— Danna Thomas

One teacher, for example, told researchers that “working with a group of coworkers that really cares” was key to feeling supported.

It’s an example of a trend that Danna Thomas observed while she was still a teacher in Baltimore. Thomas founded the teacher self-care organization Happy Teacher Revolution, which hosts gatherings in 21 states where educators talk and support each other through difficult times in the profession. She found that experienced teachers tend to shoulder an additional emotional toll as their peers lean on them for support, particularly new teachers who are finding their footing.

She believes schools are missing opportunities to invest in veteran teachers as leaders who can help to improve well-being for other staff members.

“There are people in leadership who support teachers with academics, but their phone calls or Zoom are [reserved for] just new teachers crying their eyes out with how overwhelmed they are,” Thomas says. “Teaching, it shouldn’t be getting harder as the years go on. If you have 10, 20 years under your belt, it should be less overwhelming. We have to take care of the human being who is holding it together — or it’s all gonna crash.”

In the absence of more school-based support for long-time teachers, groups like Happy Teacher Revolution try to fill the gap. One common topic of conversation among members is the power of resetting professional boundaries that crumbled during the remote leaning days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a place where they can celebrate big wins like taking a sick day, actually eating lunch during their lunch breaks, and making it home from school before dark.

“I really want folks to feel it’s sustainable that they can do this for years and years,” Thomas says of her goal. “There’s nothing better than a happy veteran teacher who’s able to teach siblings, or those kids’ kids — it’s so cool. There’s been so much conversation about individual care, and we need community care. Who is making sure that the village collective is well?”

Green-Hodnett has also seen experienced teachers start to think more about what they want their lives to look like outside of work. She recalls one woman who was part of the Real Talk forum saying that one of the biggest regrets of her 40-year teaching career was all of the missed recitals and events that involved her daughter, sacrificed so she could keep up with school work.

Green-Hodnett also recalls a former colleague, who left the school district for a new job, had more than 200 hours of unused leave.

“Teachers have to be mindful of what their capacity is, use their voice, use their leave,” Green-Hodnett says. “Chandra’s talked about how we would wait and do all our doctor's appointments in the summer, or do all our doctor's appointments on spring break. No, you need to take [leave]. If you don't take care of those things, then you retire, and then you're not able to do what you wanna do in your retirement.”

Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: Hawaii State Department of Education

Revolving Door

Yet these support circles and changing attitudes may not be enough to make sure that today’s teachers hang in there to serve as tomorrow’s veterans.

Joseph-Lacet has seen a new trend among teachers that she fears will have negative consequences on the profession. Unlike the norm from earlier in her career, she says experienced teachers now are openly mulling, “How quickly can I retire?” Not necessarily to stop working completely, but to transition to another field.

“They're like, ‘I need to bounce from this profession because it has just gotten to be too much,’” she says, “‘because it has just gotten to the point where it is breaking me mentally and or physically.’ There’s so much more of that, as opposed to people riding into retirement, having these wonderful retirement parties like they did back in the day.”

Among teachers who are retiring after long careers, she adds, some are sharing advice to younger teachers that sums up to, “Y’all don't do like I did. Don't stay here for 20 years. You can make a change. Make that change right now.”

“If younger teachers do that, again, we’re adding to this newness and this revolving door that's happening, and your veteran teachers are going to be three- and five-year folk,” Joseph-Lacet says. “That is never going to be beneficial for anyone in the school environment, and most notably the children.”

Even so, and despite her own long career as a teacher and now a teacher coach, Joseph-Lacet says that she can’t find it in herself to be excited that her own daughter is in college studying elementary education.

“On social media there’s jokes of teachers being stressed because it’s August,” she says, “but under that, there’s depression, there’s anxiety, overwhelming dread of walking into the new school year.”

© Alphavector / Shutterstock

If you’ve ever been a student, then you’ve probably done a group project at some point. And you most likely also have a horror story about a group project that went terribly wrong.

That trend was clear when EdSurge recently took a microphone to one campus and asked several students to share their group project horror stories. Every student we talked to had one.

But teaching experts say it doesn’t have to be that way. Yet fixing group projects isn’t easy, since many instructors tend to repeat the same flawed methods that their own teachers used when they were students.

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we connected with John Warner, a longtime writing instructor at colleges and a teaching consultant for Eyler Warner & Associates. He’s written books on improving writing, including “Why They Can’t Write,” as well as an essay on how to fix group projects. But he says he has trouble getting educators interested in his advice, in part because many see traditional group projects as a way to save time.

What he suggests may indeed take more time than other types of teaching, Warner says, involving more effort from teachers in setting up groups, teaching students about successful group processes and checking in on their progress.

“It's not sort of ‘set it and forget it,’” he stresses. “Because that’s asking for trouble on the backend for the instructor, to clean up the mess when a student shows up with nothing on a group project day and you have to figure out how you're going to grade them.”

We ran the student group project tales we heard by Warner to get his reaction and advice. And we addressed some big questions about what it means to teach — and to learn.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page.