- EdResearchForAction
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Tag: Human capital
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Evidence-based Practices for Teaching About Planetary Health and Environmental Challenges
Produced in partnership with SustainableED, this brief synthesizes research on how to teach Planetary Health, the interdependence of human health and the health of Earth's natural systems. Because research on Planetary Health in K-12 settings is still emerging, it also draws on the literature on environmental and climate change education. The brief explains why the subject is hard to teach and identifies five evidence-based practices: professional development that helps teachers practice specific strategies, instruction that is personally and locally relevant, a focus on solutions and collective action, structured dialogue and psychological safety, and nature-based outdoor learning. It also cautions against steering students toward predetermined answers and relying on scientific knowledge alone. Each section offers ideas for how school and district leaders and teachers might apply the findings, and the brief highlights how partners and coalitions can support this work.
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Applying Research-Based Strategies to Strategic Staffing Initiatives
This brief synthesizes research on strategic staffing, a framework for redesigning teaching roles, time, and compensation to better align educator expertise with student needs and ultimately improve teacher retention, instructional quality, and student outcomes. It examines why the traditional one-teacher-one-classroom model contributes to declining interest in teaching and high attrition, pointing to four compounding factors: unsustainable workload, insufficient autonomy and professional respect, limited career advancement, and pay disconnected from expertise and leadership. Drawing on decades of research, the brief reviews the evidence for the three core components of strategic staffing: collaborative teaching, which distributes instructional responsibility across teams; differentiated roles and career pathways, which create advancement opportunities such as teacher leadership, mentorship, and subject-area specialization without requiring teachers to leave the classroom; and differentiated compensation, which rewards leadership, specialization, and hard-to-staff roles with meaningful pay differentials. While each individual component is associated with improved teacher or student outcomes when well implemented, the evidence on comprehensive name-brand models that combine them, such as Opportunity Culture, Next Education Workforce, and the Teacher Advancement Program, remains preliminary. The brief closes with five implementation principles drawn from systems that have sustained these initiatives: communicating and building buy-in, co-designing with teachers, building capacity through professional learning, aligning policy and systems across school, district, and state levels, and working collaboratively with unions.
