Twenty-five papers address issues of the underserved gifted, including environmental influences, multicultural and global factors, special learning problems, and the highly gifted and creatively gifted. The papers are: "Twenty-five Teaching Strategies that Promote Learning Success for Underserved Gifted Populations" (Jerry Flack); "The Invisible…

This guide's 11 sections are: "Evolution of Whole School Reform (WSR) in New Jersey"; "Department of Education Organizational Structure in Support of Urban Education Reform"; "Whole School Reform Regulations"; "School Management Teams: Leading the Process"; "Becoming a Whole School Reform School";…

The New Haven Initiative for Excellence in Education is a private sector endeavor to support public schools in New Haven (Connecticut). The Initiative's premiere program is the Grants for Excellence program. Grants of up to $500 are available to teachers, administrators, and parents to fund special innovative teaching projects not normally funded…

Strategies for supporting immigrant students include providing opportunities for self-expression, ensuring that all students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, providing translation for key events and documents, having teachers and staff that reflect student cultures, maintaining first-language skills, making special efforts to…

The growing field of profit-making public-school management represents a way to begin school reform and save money. Educational Alternatives, Inc. has an agreement to manage eight elementary schools and one middle school in Baltimore, Maryland; and Whittle Communications, Inc. plans to seek contracts to manage existing public school programs. (MLF)

Argues that traditional methods of involving low-income minority parents in their children's education have not worked. Suggests ways to improve parent-teacher communication, understanding, and cooperation in urban schools. (MM)

This handbook is the fruit of two projects of the University of Minnesota's College of Education: (1) the Dowling Friendship Program, a 3-year project at a public elementary school in Minneapolis in which children with and without disabilities participated in a variety of recreation activities during school, after school, at each other's homes,…

The Urban Mathematics Collaborataive (UMC) project has the goal of contributing to the improvement of mathematics education in the inner-city schools by identifying models to enhance the professional lives of teachers and encouraging the entry of high school mathematics teachers into a larger mathematics community including mathematicians from…

A longitudinal study, involving five beginning teachers, revolved around questions about how teachers' own emerging theories of literacy instruction are shaped by their interactions with other theories and perspectives and through their own work with students who are learning to read, write, and understand text in schools. Trained in the whole…

This document describes approaches in conducting naturalistic studies in two different countries with contrasting educational settings. Naturalistic research methodology is described by one of the writers as "an explicit undertaking to lay aside our ideas and concern ourselves with finding the subjects' perspectives in their non-theoretical…

This guide presents research-based practices and elements that are essential to effective systemic reform, especially as such reform relates to the needs, challenges, and context of urban schools. It is designed to enable school leadership teams to develop, review, and revise school plans that focus on the elements of effective educational…

This guide, which is intended to assist literacy practitioners interested in establishing collaborative learning (CL) groups, outlines a collaborative learning approach that was developed during a project to coordinate citywide adult literacy efforts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Discussed in the guide's eight sections are the following topics:…

This collection of training materials describes an educational philosophy for elementary level instruction called cooperative pluralism. This approach complements and strengthens traditional multicultural educational approaches while blending them with cooperative learning and democratic education. The following materials are included: (1) brief…

The Oakland (California) Explorers is a program to help children learn about the city. The project is part of a long-term effort by the Junior Center for Art and Science to make Oakland a better place for children to be raised. Project goals are to create the following: (1) a living museum of Oakland that will include children and adolescents in…

Presented is a plan for curriculum development and evaluation which leads to involvement of public and private schools and the community in environmental education for the spectrum of citizens from children through adults. The process is described in two phases: (1) the overall program, and (2) an evaluation of a pilot implementation of segments…