This document clarifies the credentials necessary for people who wish to work in various capacities with young children, focusing on the required early childhood teacher certification and/or licensure for programs under the responsibility of the Ohio Department of Education. The document covers the following areas: selected questions on teacher…

Written documentation helps teachers highlight all of the extras they do that make a difference in education. The documentation includes a professional vita and written commentary, which are usually placed within professional portfolios. This paper examines essential features of the vita and written commentary, explaining how to collect necessary…

Describes a collaborative consultative program used with 26 elementary school teachers in three schools. Emphasis was on encouraging teachers' creativity and innovation in selecting and implementing teaching strategies. Workshops demonstrated a problem-solving approach to selecting appropriate interventions with individual children. A chart shows…

Elementary school students need to work independently during writing time and monitor and assess their own progress. This paper describes self-designed rubrics, which teachers create with the help of their students. A class activity sheet explains how to create writing rubrics based on needs and goals that students identify. (SM)

Argues that curriculum reform efforts related to the America 2000 program have ignored art education, particularly in the elementary schools. Describes the CREATES program, a field-based instructional project with visual arts, teaching/learning experiences for preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and elementary students. (CFR)

This K-3 social studies activity combines art and language arts with social studies skills and attitudes. Teachers use the old Japanese tradition of story cards to check students' comprehension, give them practice in oral communication, and develop their visual/spatial intelligence, all while teaching them about another culture. (SM)

Because school success is predicted largely by emotional and social measures, teachers and parents cannot start too early in helping children develop their emotional intelligence. The paper describes emotional intelligence, discusses how to teach it, and presents resources for learning how other schools are helping students build emotional…

Three science experiments teach elementary school students about marine-life locomotion. One teaches primary students how octopi and jellyfish move, using balloons and umbrellas. Another teaches K-6 students the up and down movement of fish in water, using condiment packets. A third teaches 4-6 students about the effect of fish swim bladders,…

Forty-one primary student teachers were divided into two groups and were instructed how to integrate certain Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools in learning activities. Only one group was guided to use Filamentality, a fill-in-the-blank interactive Web site, and to organize Internet information in a Hotlist and a Scrapbook.…

The current study examined the extent to which treatment integrity was increased and maintained for 4 teachers in their regular classroom settings as a result of performance feedback and negative reinforcement. Teachers received daily written feedback about their accuracy in implementing an intervention and were able to avoid meeting with a…

The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which teachers use question levels in the teaching of investigation skills. Six question levels based on Bloom's Taxonomy (1956) were examined in this study which included knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation and affective as well (Ghazali Mustapha, 1998).…

Fort Mill (S.C.) Elementary School developed a partnership with Winthrop University to help teachers improve how they taught writing after finding many teachers had never completed a college-level writing course and most felt they weren't very knowledgeable about assessing student writing. The results are improved student learning and professional…

This study, conducted from a constructivist perspective, examined the belief system of a prospective elementary teacher (Barbara) about science teaching and learning as she developed professional knowledge within the context of reflective science teacher education. From an analysis of interviews, observation, and written documents, I constructed a…

Education researchers and policymakers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data…

This paper provides a basic description of the methods used to make available non-instructional time and presents profiles of seven schools in the Network for Educational Renewal (NER). Each profile describes the school's unique background, approach to providing non-instructional time for teachers, and lessons learned. Some strategies identified…