By Frans van Loef & Jordan Stark, Harvard Business Review (from April 4, 2025)
When managers are overloaded as many are now, the usual leadership advice is to delegate more. But what if you’ve delegated everything you can and you still have too much work? If your team is drowning too, delegating more work simply means shifting the overload. This is not a sustainable option.
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By Ida Kristensen & Linda Liu, McKinsey & Company (from May 7, 2025)
Resilience is critical in today’s organizations, given the state of uncertainty and permacrisis in which most teams and individuals operate. Yet McKinsey research suggests that many leaders and organizations aren’t spending enough time building that resilience. A full 84 percent of leaders report feeling underprepared for future disruptions, and 60 percent of board members say their companies are not ready for the next major event.
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By Mary-Liz Shaw, EdSurge (from May 7, 2025)
With a curriculum that includes slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, two world wars and the Civil Rights Movement, American history teachers are used to venturing into emotionally charged subjects. Walking students through the unsettling complexities of the past has never been an easy job. But as history is about to take center stage in 2026 for 250th anniversary celebrations of the nation’s founding, there are growing signs that the work of teaching about the country’s past has become harder than ever.
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By Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (from April 30, 2025)
According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis.
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By Jacob Levitt, Constantinos Coutifaris, & Paul Green, Harvard Business Review (from April 25, 2025)
In the popular Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso, the titular character plays a relentlessly positive soccer coach whose care and kindness inspires his ragtag team to reach new heights. And, in fact, past academic research has largely supported the leadership style Lasso emulates, suggesting that leaders ought to be frequently positive to support their team members’ individual performance. Yet, any leader can tell you that this kind of blanket advice doesn’t always seem to track with what they see in the office: sometimes well-timed negative feedback can help drive performance and positivity can be more impactful in some moments than others.
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By Eric Hudson, Learning on Purpose (from April 27, 2025)
For the past several months, I’ve been delivering and refining a workshop for educators called “AI and the Teaching of Writing.” The purpose of this workshop is for teachers of writing to have time and space to consider the short and long-term impacts of generative AI on the work they do. Everyone brings a signature writing project, and we spend a few hours deconstructing the project (with the option to use generative AI for assistance), assessing the “vulnerability” of key tasks to inappropriate use, and considering both AI-resistant and AI-assisted ways the project could be updated or transformed. We pitch our redesigns to each other and articulate some key priorities for how we might shift from reactive to proactive in our approach to generative AI.
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By Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge (from April 24, 2025)
Since generative artificial intelligence burst onto the scene a few years ago, schools and educators have grappled with how to approach the powerful-but-experimental technology. Ban it? Embrace it? 
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By Lauren Boyer, The College Fix (from May 5, 2025)
It’s back to pen and paper for students in history Professor Helen Veit’s classroom, as she and others grapple with the effects of technology consumption in higher education.
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By Megan Zahneis, The Chronicle of Higher Education (from May 7, 2025)
As the Trump administration has taken sweeping action to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at colleges, a little-known national nonprofit that has long sought to increase the racial diversity of business-school faculty members has become collateral damage.
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By Stanley McChrystal, The New York Times (from April 13, 2025)
Fear defines us. Not by its presence, but by how we respond to it.  There are two kinds of fear. The first is primal. It grips us when lightning strikes too close or when the crack of a bullet signals imminent danger. In those moments, our bodies freeze, and our focus narrows. But with time, experience and discipline, we recover. We learn to navigate perilous situations, even to function in the face of fear.
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By Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive (from April 14, 2025)
Harvard University President Alan Garber said Monday that officials there would not yield to the Trump administration’s litany of demands to maintain access to federal funding, arguing the federal government had overstepped its authority by issuing the ultimatum.
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By Big Questions Institute (from April 2025)
Last week the Wall Street Journal published an Opinion piece titled DEI and the State Department: Subsidized international schools try to evade the Trump-Rubio ban on racially divisive pedagogy, by a young writer who made a name as a Cornell University student who defended Donald Trump on Fox and Friends during his first term.
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By Angela Duckworth, After Babel (from April 18, 2025)
Across the globe, schools are beginning to adopt the third norm of The Anxious Generation: phone-free schools. But countries, states, and individual schools are taking very different approaches. Some have implemented bell-to-bell policies (the better option), while others restrict use only during class time (which means students focus on their phones in between classes… and often in class as well). Some enforce the rules from the top down; others engage students and parents in the process. With so many variations—and such rapid implementation—we still know remarkably little about what’s actually happening on the ground, and we’re only beginning to understand the impact these changes may be having.
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By Evie Blad, Ed Week (from April 14, 2025)
When Laura Link works with districts to review their grading policies, she starts by asking a simple question: What are grades for?  Are grades meant to motivate students? To help teachers determine who needs more support? To inform parents of their children’s progress?
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By Faisal Hoque, Thomas H. Davenport, & Erik Nelson, Sloan Review
(from April 9, 2025)
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming how organizations operate, but this transformation extends far beyond technical implementation. Modern AI systems are increasingly taking on roles that previously would have been filled by human workers. People working alongside these AI systems often need reskilling, upskilling, and training in behavioral traits such as critical thinking. To successfully manage this blend of AI tools and humans working together in new ways, leaders need to understand complex human and organizational factors, such as agility and cultural change, personality dynamics, and emotional intelligence.
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By Justin Cerenzia, The Academic DJ (from April 15, 2025)
As someone who (mostly) advocates for thoughtful AI engagement—and in many cases careful adoption—I figured it might be helpful to share explicitly how I'm integrating AI tools into my daily work. My role primarily involves supporting faculty, though I also teach one section of 11th grade U.S. History. Much of what follows is directly relevant to teachers’ professional lives outside the classroom, yet I’ve also recently identified what I think are clear opportunities for meaningful classroom integration.
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By Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy (from April 13, 2025)
I was giving a presentation recently on differentiation, specifically about tiered assignments, a strategy that offers different tiers or levels of challenge, and students only work at the level that matches their current readiness. I’ve always been a fan of this strategy, but during that session, someone asked a question that I couldn’t answer: How do we grade these fairly? If one student is working at a very challenging level, and another is working at a much more basic level, and they both do well on the assignment, should they get the same grade?
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By Anna Merod, K-12 Dive (from April 14, 2025)
Across the education, government, healthcare and business sectors, Comparitech recorded 2,190 ransomware attacks globally in Q1 of 2025— a jump of more than 1,000 incidents year over year. Just 197 of those 2,190 attacks have been confirmed by Comparitech so far. Comparitech researchers noted in their analysis that it often takes months after an incident to confirm a ransomware attack.
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By Eric Hudson, Learning on Purpose (from March 28, 2025)
About a month ago, someone asked me during a school workshop, “How has your AI use changed in the last two years?” It’s a great question, and I thought it might be helpful to share an expanded version of my answer.
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By Anna Merod, K-12 Dive (from March 10, 2025)
A startling majority — 82% — of K-12 schools experienced a cyber incident between July 2023 and December 2024, according to a report released Thursday by the nonprofit Center for Internet Security.
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By Daniel Pink, The Washington Post (from March 3, 2025)
If you’re looking for continued signs of inflation, bypass your local supermarket and head to Harvard Yard. Twenty years ago, the mean grade-point average for Harvard University undergraduates was 3.41. Today, Harvard’s average GPA has ballooned to 3.8. At America’s oldest university, 79 percent of the grades are now A’s and A-minuses ― a 32 percent increase from 10 years earlier.
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By Kevin Graham, Lookout Management Inc.
Welcome to our presentation of results for the Community and Belonging Survey of Students. In November 2024, 90 independent schools participated (73 American and 17 Canadian), involving 21,468 students enrolled in Grades 9-12.
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By Katherine Johnson Martinko, After Babel (from March 10, 2025)
If you have ever wondered what it is like to raise a bunch of boys without video games, TV, tablets, or smartphones, I have plenty of firsthand experience to share!  My three sons, now aged 15, 13, and 9, have grown up with minimal screens in our home.
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Mark Crotty, NWAIS
Every few years an old joke about the search for a head of school resurfaces. The gag is about the position statement and the ideal candidate. Unsurprisingly, the school hopes to find someone who would be the composite of various deities on their best days.
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By Julie Faulstich, Talking Out of School (from March 28, 2025)
Whereas the customary work of a nonprofit board is limited to scrutinizing management, the new work requires new rules of engagement and unorthodox ways of fulfilling a board’s responsibilities. The pressures on most nonprofits today are too great for the old model to suffice.
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