A growing body of literature has highlighted the affordances of distributive forms of instructional leadership as a means to broaden and deepen instructional leadership capacity within schools. Yet, specifically how the capabilities of such key leaders as high school department chairs can be fostered to realize enhanced instructional capacity…

States are in a crucial phase of implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which outline the knowledge and skills that students in grades kindergarten through 12 are expected to learn in mathematics and English language arts (ELA) to be prepared for college and careers. As of July 2013, 45 states and the District of Columbia have…

An early warning system is a data-based tool that helps predict which students are on the right path towards eventual graduation or other grade-appropriate goals. Through such systems, stakeholders at the school and district levels can view data from a wide range of perspectives and gain a deeper understanding of student data. This "Statewide…

It has been reported in the literature that the disparities of student achievement within schools are often larger than the disparity across schools. In the secondary school context, analysing student achievement data at department level enables a fine-grained approach to identifying particular departments and teachers within them that are…

The study was carried out to establish the competencies of graduate teachers who graduated from teacher education programs between the year 2005 and 2010. Multi-stage sampling was used in selecting 432 respondents comprising educational administrators and graduate teachers working in the three levels of education across two states of Southern…

This paper examines the use and role of the term "hypothesis" in science teacher education as described by teacher students. Data were collected through focus group interviews conducted at seven occasions with 32 students from six well-known Swedish universities. The theoretical framework is a sociocultural and pragmatist perspective on…

State juvenile justice systems face critical problems when it comes to juvenile delinquency issues such as reentry--when offenders return home from incarceration--and substance abuse. GAO was asked to review juvenile reentry and substance abuse program research and efforts by the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Juvenile Justice and…

In this paper we explore how mathematics department leaders manage curriculum (what is taught), teaching (how it is taught) and learner progression (what results) for 14-19 year olds. The background to the study is a range of national, and international, concerns about participation rates in university entrance level mathematics. Given the…

The authors investigate the size and stability of departmental effects in English secondary schooling during a period in which extensions to parental choice and annual publication of school performance tables had significantly increased competitive pressures on schools. Their database of nearly 450 English secondary schools enables them to…

Undertaken during a period when changes in the assessment of English in public examinations at 16+ were becoming embedded in classroom practice, this comparative research explores where poetry is located within the newly aligned examination assessment frameworks of New Zealand and England. It comments on how these frameworks are locally…

This article reports on the use of a text-based verbal protocol (Afflerbach, 2000) situated within individual interviews to elicit secondary English teachers' perspectives on new literacies (Albers & Harste, 2007; Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). Ranging significantly in their teaching experience and comfort with new media and…

In 2009, the United States Department of Education conducted a competition for a second round of Striving Readers grants. Its dual purpose was to: (1) Raise middle and high school students' literacy levels in Title I-eligible schools with significant numbers of students reading below grade level; and (2) Build a strong, scientific research base…

Educators have known for generations the significance of teaching youngsters to read, but have turned their collective attention in only the past decade or so to the state of inadequate reading in high schools. The view is alarming by many accounts and has led national organizations to urge high school principals to add yet another responsibility…

The purpose of this study was to describe Markdale High School's change from separate college preparatory and general level classes to heterogeneously-grouped classes in English, mathematics, science, and social studies, with particular emphasis on the principal's leadership style, change process, and teacher concerns (Hall & Hord, 2006)…

This article looks at the move from a management structure based on discrete subject departments managed by subject specialist principal teachers within Scottish secondary schools towards groupings of subjects (faculties) with a single manager. This article examines the impact of this change upon the experiences of students and probationer…