Teaching & Learning Blog

Teacher in a Strange Land

From January 2010 to September 2018, Nancy Flanagan, an education writer and consultant focusing on teacher leadership, wrote about the inconsistencies and inspirations, the incomprehensible, immoral and imaginative, in American education. She spent 30 years in a K-12 music classroom in Hartland, Mich., and was named Michigan Teacher of the Year in 1993. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: teacher leaders.

Education Opinion The Difference between TFA "Corps Members" and Regular Teachers
The Teach for America alumni assumed they already had a seat at the table, and a genuine voice in policy creation. The student teachers in Michigan were just trying to get hired.
Nancy Flanagan, October 24, 2011
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4 min read
Education Opinion Classroom Walls: We Don't Need No Thought Control
The best classrooms are full of sticky items, places where kids cluster and are encouraged to interpret and apply things they've learned.
Nancy Flanagan, October 22, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Discouraged from Dreaming
Most days, it feels as if the only people who get to have a dream about wonderful schools are those who aren't actually working in schools.
Nancy Flanagan, October 18, 2011
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2 min read
Education Opinion The Mitchell 20
A new film tells the real, and often heartbreaking, story of one school in Phoenix, twenty teachers, a dedicated principal--and how they collectively decided to improve the one thing they had control over: teaching.
Nancy Flanagan, October 11, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Three Things I Used to Think About School Reform
What did you used to think about school reform? And what do you think now?
Nancy Flanagan, October 8, 2011
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4 min read
Education Opinion Whatever Happened to Local Control?
Beneath all the rhetoric about giving clueless local boards too much agency there's something very disturbing--a whiff of we-know-better, managerial arrogance. As a teacher, I'd rather take my chances on electing people I know.
Nancy Flanagan, October 3, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Regular Teachers, Regular Schools
Good teaching is not about classroom rules, cute videos, raising test scores, cool field experiences or unions. It's about relationships, mastery, analysis, persistence, diagnosis and continuous reflection. It's complex, layered intellectual work. And it happens in hundreds of thousands of "regular" classrooms, every day.
Nancy Flanagan, September 29, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Dispatch From Detroit
I never used to believe in Great Education Conspiracy theories--that dark forces were trying to shoot enough holes in the ship of public education to make it sink, whereupon a huge market for materials production and human capital would open up. Lately, I've been pretty sure that's exactly what's happening, beginning in places like Detroit.
Nancy Flanagan, September 26, 2011
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2 min read
Education Opinion Teacher for Sale
Blurring the lines between private enterprise, market-based policy-making and genuine investment in public education.
Nancy Flanagan, September 21, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Feeling Down? Think Public Ed has Failed? Read This!
Teachers use clipboards, imagination--and good instruction--to get over some very high bars. So much for the myth of lazy, uncaring unionized teachers.
Nancy Flanagan, September 16, 2011
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1 min read
Education Opinion Privatizing Teaching
The idea of hiring free-lance "teacherpreneurs" is thrilling to management types. But how does privatizing look, down the road?
Nancy Flanagan, September 13, 2011
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2 min read
Education Opinion Ten Alternative Tips for New Teachers
Ten out-of-the-ordinary bits of advice for new teachers.
Nancy Flanagan, September 8, 2011
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4 min read
Education Opinion Your Teacher Said WHAT?
Here's what we should be asking about the Common Core Everything.
Nancy Flanagan, September 5, 2011
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3 min read
Education Opinion Opting Out
I believe parents have absolute justification to take control over their children's schooling. Which means empowering parents to make bold decisions, beginning with exercising their right to pull their kids out of destructive and unnecessary standardized testing
Nancy Flanagan, September 1, 2011
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3 min read
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