The CAST (content area specialized training) model of professional development enables sustainable teacher leadership and is responsive to the need for culturally relevant educational practices. The purpose of this paper is to share the background, methods, findings and recommendations of a case study on the CAST initiative in Guam. The case study…

As schools and school districts find their funds being cut or eliminated, they are turning to various organizations for assistance to help in the teaching/learning process. One such organization is the university. Quite often these schools or districts not only lack the funds, but also lack the technical and resource capacities to implement the…

Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

Over the past two decades, community organizing has emerged as an effective force for school improvement. In the context of shrinking education funding, stubborn opportunity and achievement gaps between low-income and wealthy children and between children of color and White children, and polarizing debate on school reform, community organizing…

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as…

This paper documents the initial process by which a San Diego middle school, located in a low-income and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and repeatedly failing to meet No Child Left Behind provisions, restructured into an academically rigorous, detracked charter school. The discussion of the political experience and working relationships…

The promise of university-public school partnerships as contexts for mutually beneficial learning, or "simultaneous renewal," has been well established (Goodlad, 1994, 1999). However, difficulties in creating and sustaining these kinds of collaborative contexts for teacher education are also well known, including practical challenges…

Today's children spend less and less time in the outdoors, leading Richard Louv in 2008 to coin the term "nature deficit disorder." Louv pointed out that experiences with nature are essential to a child's physical and emotional development and that the lack of these types of experiences has led to an increase in child obesity, attention…

Once upon a time, the relationship of Boston universities to the city's school system was simply to accept worthy candidates into the freshman class and produce a few dozen new teachers each year to fill staff vacancies. For many decades, universities stayed away from Boston schools. Boston trained its elementary teachers at its own normal school,…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…

Inclusion for students with disabilities into the general education classroom has grown exponentially over the last decade. With legislation, such as, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and The Individuals with Disabilities Educational Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 schools are moving towards integrating their classrooms more than they ever have in the…

Organizational sensemaking is the attempt to understand complex events that occur in organizations (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). This study focuses on the sensemaking leadership capabilities of a leadership team promoting comprehensive reform. The cross-school leadership team engaged in organizational sensemaking in order to…

Every school district has policies and procedures for evaluating teachers that are shaped by state law and local collective bargaining agreements. As a result of No Child Left Behind and other accountability legislation many states modified requirements about the frequency of evaluation and now require the use of student achievement data as one…

The major purpose of this descriptive report is to provide an overview of the structure, capacity, and roles of educational service agencies (ESAs) across five states--Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin--in the Great Lakes region, within the context of the broader statewide systems of support for educational improvement and progress.…

In large numbers of elementary and secondary schools across the United States teachers are being called upon to provide support to colleagues through a process called "instructional coaching." Despite widespread implementation of this role, resulting in part from federal initiatives, there is little consensus regarding its operational…