Frank Reliford, the Principal at Dee-Mack Intermediate since 2005, is familiar to almost every child in the community. 260 Students attend Reliford's school, and their status is a point of pride: Dee-Mack Intermediate is consistently one of the highest performing schools in the state. The change in student performance correlates to the…

Teachers at a laboratory middle school in Evanston, Illinois, reconceptualized and revitalized an ailing student council according to some meaningful goals: empowering and involving all students, creating an atmosphere for cooperative action, and offering opportunities for service. There are three main arms to this action council (service,…

Describes an eighth-grade teacher's decision to heed innervoices and make time for poetry in her classroom. The class began by reading fun-filled, picture-book poetry; enlisted the help of school and town librarians in finding compelling single-author works and anthologies; and finally wrote "recipe poems" together. (Contains 27…

This report describes a program for increasing the thinking skills of fourth grade students in one classroom in northern Illinois. Both objective and subjective data gathering found that students experienced difficulty in relating and applying facts and concepts on tasks requiring more sophisticated thinking. Solution strategies combined with an…

This paper summarizes an investigation of the format used for equating the 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) sixth grade reading test. In 1992, each student took only one test, either a narrative test or an expository test. In 1993, there was only one test, which included both formats. Several possible approaches for linking the 1993…

The impact of mobility on academic achievement has been the focus of many studies. The findings are generally consistent and suggest that mobility lowers student achievement, particularly when the students are from low-income, less educated families. For this study, 30 students, classified as either mobile or stable, were randomly selected from a…

This document is a conference presentation on the use of portfolios as an evaluation tool for middle school music students. All of the pages are suitable for use with an overhead projector. Areas covered include reasons for teaching the arts as both an intellectual discipline and vocational education; Illinois state goals for musical learning for…

Plans for transforming middle-level schools in Illinois are described in this report, which serves as a guiding document for creating middle-level schools that acknowledge the needs of early adolescence. The report, facilitated by a Carnegie report entitled "Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century," describes early…

Discusses collaboration between a teacher and an education professor in developing and implementing a new reading/language-arts program in a fifth-grade classroom. The move from a traditional basal reading and language-arts textbook approach to one using novels and process writing meant many changes for both teacher and students. An Author's…

This teachers guide contains information and activities to provide 5th-grade students with a hands-on experience with air, land, and water pollution in Illinois. This booklet incorporates previous documents entitled: "Water the Liquid of Life,""The Land We Depend On," and "The Air We Breathe." The materials are…

This is a case study of two sixth-grade teachers from Illinois who participated in a semester-long inservice to learn about Chickscope, a supercomputing application that allows students and teachers remote access to magnetic resonance images of chicken embryos. Shows how they produced an inquiry-based unit on chicken weight and measurement.…

This lesson plan is designed to give intermediate elementary school students the opportunity to use a highway map to prepare for an imaginary trip to a chosen destination in Illinois or surrounding state. In order to complete the assigned task successfully, students will need to utilize all skills learned during preceding class periods. The major…

This paper describes a program to increase motivation and interest in social studies among fourth-grade students in a growing middle class community in central Illinois. The lack of motivation and disinterest in social studies is evidenced by student attitude surveys, teacher surveys, teacher observations of student time on task, and student…

This report describes a plan for utilizing critical thinking in the art education setting to improve students' decision-making and problem-solving abilities. The targeted population consists of sixth-grade students in a growing middle class, rural based community located in northern Illinois. The problem of weak critical thinking skills was…

The Illinois State Board of Education in cooperation with the Illinois Consumer Education Association produced this lesson plan book as a resource for teachers as they implement the consumer education mandate in secondary schools. Classroom instruction ideas, techniques, and lessons were provided by teachers from Illinois. A committee of consumer…