This study of the knowledge bases of education began with a "meta-review" of the research literature in special and regular education and identification of specific learning variables. The effort focused on determining the extent that special and regular educators work from common bases of knowledge and the degree of appropriate merging during…

Starting a new position is exhilarating. The key challenge is to make the strange familiar as soon as possible. There are new policies to learn, new colleagues to get to know, and new surroundings to adapt to. All these aspects and more need to be understood and managed well in order to focus on the primary task at hand--teaching and learning. Of…

The Interdisciplinary Teamed Instruction (ITI) project investigated the effects of interdisciplinary, teamed instruction on secondary school teaching and learning. It examined the effectiveness of a professional development model that facilitated the development, implementation, and evaluation of ITI. Through summer institutes and onsite…

Investigated the effects of a year-long project designed to bring learning to the forefront in two urban accelerated schools through "Powerful Learning Partners" (collegial partners for teachers), "Powerful Learning Seminars" (teaching a constructivist approach), and a teacher-constructed checklist for teacher self-evaluation.…

This article introduces Project PREPARE, a 5-year project to develop a collaborative site of practice and inquiry between two universities, primary and elementary schools in a poor rural town, and the school district. During the collaboration, there were steady improvement in student achievement in reading and mathematics on multiple measures.…

This qualitative case study reports on processes and outcomes of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) project at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). It addresses a critical challenge in studying systemic reform in complex organizations: the lack of methodologies that…

This report is one of nine detailed case studies of small urban high schools that served as the foundation for the Education Resource Strategies (ERS) report "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools." These nine schools were dubbed "Leading Edge Schools" because they stand apart from other high…

This study examined differences in nine factors between a group of the highest-performing needs high schools (HPHN) and a group of the lowest performing high-needs (LPHN) high schools using teacher responses from a national dataset. The factors are: (1) shared mission and goals; (2) professional development; (3) collaboration among teachers (4)…

Blended learning is a promising model for supporting teacher professional development that combines the advantages of traditional face-to-face interaction with the flexibility of online learning. In this study, we examine the impact of two one-year blended learning programs on teachers' attitudes, knowledge, and classroom practices. These…

This report reviews the research and literature on the improvement of college teaching through use of a model that stresses a supportive teaching culture and helps motivate individual faculty members to improve their teaching by utilizing a variety of sources of informative feedback. The sources include: colleagues and consultants, department…

Delivering high-quality instruction requires innovation in program development and delivery. This article examines the use of merging technologies in the delivery of learner-based instruction, the development of collaborative teaching environments that maximize the efforts of faculty content experts, and the implementation of databases to manage…

To truly develop as teachers, we need to be free to explore teaching, and exploration can be based on a set of principles and ways to explore. Principles can include: (1) transcending the goal of improving our teaching by aiming at seeing teaching differently, (2) taking responsibility for our own teaching while recognizing the need for others,…

This paper summarizes the first 2 years of a school improvement effort in a low-performing rural school district in southern Virginia that involved developing a balanced K-12 curriculum aligned with the state's standards of learning. Project evaluation focused on changes in the school environment and in teaching and learning that resulted from the…

Explores how community characteristics of socioeconomic class; rural, small-town, suburban, or urban location; and culture shaped the principal's expectations for student progress, educational goals, recruitment and retention, supervision and staff development, and teacher collaboration in five elementary school programs for preschool students…

An English language arts methods course developed through a professional teacher network offers many advantages of a professional development school (PDS) but is easier for individual teachers and university instructors to initiate than a PDS. This report describes a writing methods course that an expert National Writing Project (NWP) teacher…