This report summarizes AISD's REACH program teachers' attitudes toward strategic compensation, comparing results from 2008-2009 to 2009-2010.

School design has become increasingly complex for the owner, educator, architect and designer. Decisions can affect a student's performance, a teacher's ability to educate, a facility's impact on the environment, a staff's ability to maintain that facility, and a community's desire to be prudent. But the first consideration should be the students.…

This article discusses the regulation of teacher dress and its intersection with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, individual State Religious Garb Statutes, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Transitioning into a new role can be difficult in any walk of life, and this is no different for physical educators entering a new teaching environment. In a new setting, a physical educator may go through a socialization process where beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and teaching philosophies are influenced. Teacher socialization research suggests…

Changing lives, changing schools, indeed--any impact the author has had on changing schools in any way is because Ted and Nancy Sizer changed his life and growth as an educator. In this article, he describes how the Sizers have been a part of his development as an educator.

Effective school-based induction for new teachers involves much more than mentoring; it requires a comprehensive array of supports buttressed by a collaborative professional culture. Yet few schools are able to offer such a nourishing environment to their new hires. What would it take to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal? In 2005 team…

In 2008-09, Colegio Ingles had a watershed year in terms of teachers learning to enhance one another's skills. Beneath a deceptively congenial surface, teachers at this Mexican preK-9th grade school were avoiding professional confrontations and rarely observed one another's classes or shared teaching solutions and innovations. That same year, the…

The recession of 2008-2009 and the continuing decline in local, state, and federal funds available to support higher education have resulted in serious budget cuts and belt-tightening. Given that faculty constitute an institution's most costly resource, it was not surprising, though it is nonetheless disheartening, to learn of the University of…

Across the nation, special educators are the most thinly stretched professional educators, and they do need carefully designed support from paraprofessionals. Giangreco and Broer (2009) reported that assigning paraprofessionals either to classrooms or to individual children with disabilities has become a growing model of providing services to…

Current teacher accountability initiatives such as those included in the "No Child Left Behind" legislation in the United States create particular difficulties that impact deleteriously on the performance of professional educators. The quality of public education is undermined when teachers are held accountable to an external authority…

This book tackles the concerns of stressed teachers. Whether from nurturance suffering (stress related to caring for students) or from the piles of paperwork yet to be tackled, this text helps the reader sort through the causes of stress, the emotional, physical and social reactions to stress and how one can begin to plan a stress management plan.…

In this powerful essay, Juan F. Carrillo, a teacher educator in Austin, Texas, reflects on an encounter with a first-year Latina teacher, Christina, who has decided to leave the profession. Despite successfully learning and applying critical pedagogy, Christina finds herself isolated and frustrated, stuck between a societal push for standardized…

For music educators, the first three years of in-service teaching are often the toughest. They are the years when teachers are still learning their craft--or, perhaps more accurately, learning how best to apply that craft in real-life situations. Dealing with students, parents, administrators, even fellow teachers, is still a novel and sometimes…

Much of the conversation in recent years about how to attract and retain high-quality teachers has focused on salaries--how much teachers are paid, the possibilities of differentiated pay scales, and pay for performance. But it has become increasingly clear that teachers take much more than salary into account when tallying up working conditions.…

International educational benchmarks make disappointing reading for Americans, but they also indicate a way forward. PISA results show strong performance is possible. Whether in Japan, Korea, Finland or Canada, many countries display strong overall performance and show socioeconomic background doesn't determine results. Some countries show that…