The past year has been a test like no other for the California Community Colleges' students, faculty and staff, serving up pain and loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice. Yet despite these challenges they continue to show progress toward meeting goals of the system's Vision for Success, which sets a path to increase certificate…

Behavior contracts, also known as contingency contracts, have been used as a behavioral strategy for decades (Allen et al., 1993; Bowman-Perrott et al., 2015). Originating from the field of applied behavioral analysis, behavior contracts define behavioral expectations and specify contingent rewards for displaying target behaviors (Cooper et al.,…

How do we motivate students to practice and persist when facing challenges inherent in learning to play an instrument? In this article, I synthesize research findings into strategies to encourage students' mastery goal orientations and intrinsic motivation. Educators can use these strategies in the classroom or as inspiration to create innovative…

The aim of this article is to illuminate and discuss evaluation and evaluation systems in relation to the pace of change. It is argued that evaluation promotes and accelerates change. The article will thus contribute to a critical scrutiny of evaluation as a societal phenomenon and as a widespread practice in education. To accomplish this aim, the…

Physical Educators track and assess goals for their students, programs, and national standards to know if the program is effective. Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) has been utilized in various settings throughout the years and offers a unique approach for assessment and program evaluation. GAS provides an alternative tool for assessing skills in…

Youth tend to focus more on the outcome of a goal than on the process. An outcome orientation places a heavy emphasis on the comparison to others and the finishing placement. A process orientation, or a focus on the present and the steps needed to perform successfully, allows a person to pay attention to the lessons learned, the enjoyment of…

Too often student services have become a provider of discrete assistance in which one-way information transactions take place between the staff/student paraprofessionals providers and the students receiving the services. Students attend academic advising appointments, listen during tutorial or small groups study meetings, and read computer screens…

The purpose of this Strategies feature series is to provide coaches examples of how they could integrate the NSSC within coaching practice. The series begins with Neelis and colleagues describing the importance of developing the profession of sport coaching, how the profession has evolved over time, and the importance of personal professional…

A dilemma for teachers at all levels is planning for transfer of learning, or students' long-term retention. Transfer of learning takes time, a precious commodity for teachers bound by a tight schedule. Unfortunately, transfer often gets lost in the day-to-day realities of schools, including testing requirements. One way for the teacher to make…

The North Central Region Aging Network (NCRAN) formed out of a need to strengthen the potential for meeting curricular and educational demands related to the topic of aging. By pooling resources, establishing interactive and consistent methods of idea sharing, working collectively to assess community needs, and launching professional development…

Many school leaders are committed to providing coaching to teachers, but coaching doesn't come together in their school because they haven't taken time to communicate a clear definition of coaching to the school and, especially, set up a clear structure for a coaching program. Aguilar, an education consultant and respected author on coaching,…

What is the difference between schools who are using technology effectively and those who are not? More often than not, says Culatta, it comes down to creating a vision for learning before jumping into buying devices or software. Culatta describes how using a shared set of digital-learning strategies helped the Los Angeles Unified School District…

The ultimate goal of a quality physical education program is to develop physically literate individuals who demonstrate skill competencies, apply knowledge, demonstrate health-enhancing behaviors, exhibit prosocial behaviors, and recognize the value of physical activity for a lifetime. The development and implementation of goal-oriented physical…

Improving literacy outcomes for each and every student is a goal worthy of educators' best efforts. This high goal is made more challenging by shifting mandates in education that can leave literacy professionals and school leaders disoriented, seeking a guaranteed fix. The authors propose a more coherent, more effective way to attain this goal:…

This article describes a model that systems can use to build contexts that enhance human functioning and promote valued outcomes for individuals with intellectual disability (ID). Our premise is that that systems have a responsibility to build contexts that enhance human functioning and promote valued outcomes for people with ID, and that this…