Suzie Boss

A year after wildfires swept through Southern California, destroying homes and schools and scarring the landscape, local students are taking the lead to cultivate a greener future. Their collaborative efforts offer a model for other communities affected by climate change and a reminder that, as a fifth-grade volunteer named Devika said, “even small acts can lead to big differences.” The cross-age learning initiative is called the TREEAMS project.

How did a community of creative educators come together to flip the script on AP Biology? As veteran science teacher Noel Pauller explains, it’s a long story—involving a pet hamster, YouTube videos, and inquiry strategies more commonly found in project-based learning. Pauller had more than two decades of classroom experience when he agreed to teach Advanced Placement Biology for the first time in the 2021–22 school year.

At the American International School of Guangzhou (AISG) in southern China, building a data culture is a goal shared across both campuses, serving more than 1,000 students from pre-K through high school. Embedding a data-driven culture of teaching and learning tops the list of the school’s six strategic goals.. It has taken time for the school’s commitment to data to take hold.