The combination of the recent push for reform-based teaching and federal legislation has placed a renewed emphasis on professional development across all content areas. The development of content standards and the No Child Left Behind Act have created new expectations for students to achieve, as well as for teachers to utilize better teaching…

Wouldn't it be great if all your teachers were as good as your best? Teaching is often an isolated profession in which teachers work behind closed doors, doing their own thing. Peer coaching is a collaborative, ongoing process that can increase the effectiveness of all your teachers. This "Focus On" is designed to lead a faculty into the…

No Child Left Behind mandates have given teachers new responsibilities in data analysis and the implementation of strategies that meet individual student needs. Providing tools and methods for data collection, managing it, and then analyzing it is now a basic need for teachers. By aligning assessments for the specific purpose of addressing…

Recent school reforms such as NCLB have focused on standardizing learning outcomes, and in the process have stimulated many schools to standardize curricular content, particularly if those schools are in Program Improvement (PI) status as a result of not meeting testing targets. But these attempts at standardization have ignored the fact that…

The passage of Public Law 94-142 (the Education of All Handicapped Children Act) in 1975 established the rights of children with disabilities to a public school education in the least restrictive environment. Fifteen years later, it was amended and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (PL 101-476, 1990), still intended to…

Despite the ever-increasing number of online professional development (OPD) programs, relatively few studies have been conducted to examine the efficacy of such programs for teachers and students. This manuscript presents findings from an impact study of OPD courses in fractions, algebraic thinking, and measurement on 79 fifth grade teachers'…

The No Child Left Behind education act mandates that school districts develop supplemental educational service programs for students not demonstrating mathematical proficiency on state standardized math assessments. Yet there is limited understanding of issues related to supplemental educational service math programs. The purpose of this…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), districts, schools, and educators are pressured to collect, analyze and report data annually regarding student performance. If high-stakes assessments are to be useful tools for educators in their classrooms, the data need to be applicable in conveying meaningful instructional information…

This comparative case study investigated the teaching practices of secondary English language arts teachers who are reading endorsed versus secondary English language arts teachers who are not reading endorsed. Florida Department of Education mandated that all reading teachers, and strongly encouraged all English language arts teachers be reading…

A report recently released by the Center on Education Policy reveals that the four-year-old No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has indeed served to shine a light on the importance of professional development for K-12 educators. Beyond that basic fact, though, any real broad-based impact on the training of educators remains inconclusive. While the…