Wayne Strange is a sixth-grade student and Bob Mishlove is an art teacher at Nathan R. Goldblatt Elementary School. Bob is a participant in the Building Community, Curriculum and Leadership initiative of the Chicago Public School's Fine and Performing Arts Magnet Cluster Program for elementary schools. Collaborating with the Chicago Arts…

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We…

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located.…

The publication in June of Sir Peter Williams' review of mathematics teaching in early years' settings and primary schools came at a time when the thoughts of many teachers were turning towards a well-earned summer break. However, the report has attracted much attention and promises a fundamental shake-up of attitudes and approaches to the…

The papers in this collection provide compelling arguments that the use of Adapted Primary Literature (APL) in science education holds great promise for enriching inquiry science instruction at the secondary level. The integration of this genre of written text into science curricula illustrates the ways in which reasoning in reading and reasoning…

The author of this article describes her week observing a Montessori class in the Adam Vesviva School at Kibbutz Ga'ash, located on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The headmaster of the school, Yariv Ya'ari, had previously been associated with Democratic Schools, an alternate to the public educational system, whose philosophy was established at Adam…

The eight contributions to this special issue provide an informative focus on many aspects of peer-based victimization in schools. Often using sophisticated quantitative and analytic procedures, they advance our knowledge in several important domains, pointing out important contextual variables, interactions, and mediating factors in the negative…

At its heart are the National Education Association's "Status of the American Public School Teacher" surveys, which are conducted every five years and offer unprecedented insights into the professional lives and experiences of teachers nationwide. This volume analyzes and summarizes the survey's findings, while also offering commentaries…

The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural long-term trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events. Classroom talk plays an important role in mediating this long-term process, and in this article I argue that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of classroom dialogue, both…

The series of articles presented in this journal issue reports a systematic approach to judging the validity of a test within a framework recommended by Kane (2001, 2004a). The authors' approach effectively integrates quantitative and qualitative tools, showing the role of psychometric models in validation, and emphasizes the importance of clearly…

After more than 20 years of vague reference to the principal as instructional leader, progress is finally being made, and the specificity and results are truly awesome. In 1989, William Smith and Richard Andrews wrote a monograph titled "Instructional Leadership: How Principals Make a Difference." In their study of 1,200 school…

Although well documented from a British perspective, empirical research exploring the spiritual lives of primary school children in the Australian context is a field in which scholarship is beginning to emerge. This article reports on one particular finding which emerged from an Australian study seeking to identify some characteristics of…

In this article, the author presents teaching tips for elementary second or foreign language teachers. These include (1) using index cards for beginning level vocabulary practice; (2) chanting the words or phrases to help students remember; (3) taking the students' work out the door and spread the language to a wider audience; (4) pruning an…

Many school library media specialists, especially in elementary schools, establish library clubs and library monitor programs. In most cases, these clubs and programs are limited to students assisting with clerical duties in the library such as shelving books and manning the circulation desk under supervision. The library media specialist assigns…

This essay reports on a university-school oral history project at an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. It theorizes the dialectic of place and history as expressed in the voices of the school community and goes on to suggest some tenets for a public sphere pedagogy rooted in material rhetoric and economic geography. (Contains 14 notes.)