Districts in communities experiencing population shifts are being challenged to address three concerns simultaneously: be responsive to the strengths and educational needs of students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, provide meaningful professional development for an expanding or contracting workforce to meet those needs, and ensure that…

Teaching laboratory science in a high school setting has never been easy. Time is available in short blocks; laboratory facilities are often quite limited. In most American high schools, teachers are responsible not only for preparation of their lesson plans, but also for ordering and preparing any materials to be used in a lab, with little or no…

This article discusses an instructional development system called "holistic" approach, a strategy to improve high school education in Chicago. The initiative includes new curriculum materials, aligned to district standards, as well as assessments and ongoing teacher coaching and training that are designed for the curriculum. The design…

In 2002, Principal Candy McCarthy of Alisal High School took a big risk on behalf of her teachers and students. Because her school had been designated "under-performing," she received supplemental funding for school improvement purposes. McCarthy decided to use all of the additional funds to purchase collaborative planning time for…

The purpose of this paper is to present the Large Unit District Association virtual high school (LUDA-VHS) project and discuss its design, development, and implementation. A model developed at the Center for the Application of Information Technologies for designing online classes will be presented and discussed. The focus of the paper will be to…

Biology teachers in introductory and upper level high school courses generally present principles of taxonomy as part of the curriculum. Students learn about classification systems that categorizes species into recognized taxonomic groups based on their degrees of structural divergence or derived ancestral traits. References made, hereafter, to…

The author of this paper submits that students have a natural inquisitiveness; hence, students must be active in learning. Thus, the student must learn to conjecture and prove or disprove said conjecture. Ergo, the purpose of the paper is to submit the thesis that learning with the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) can enhance the students'…

While most of the dialogue in education today is about accountability, standardized testing, and adequate yearly progress, the truth is that student success is deeply connected to the physical, emotional, and cognitive needs that they have at different ages. The best schools already know this and follow practices that are academically engaging and…

This unit was created as a result of a summer institute sponsored by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. The Center's goal is to improve student learning of foreign languages in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). To this end, the Center provides professional support for foreign language…