"Louisiana Believes" embraces the principle that all children can achieve at high levels, as evidenced in Louisiana's recent adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). "Louisiana Believes" also promotes the idea that Louisiana's educators should be empowered to make decisions to support the success of their students.…

As the use of online courses in high schools increases rapidly across the United States, schools are using courses from a multitude of sources to achieve a variety of educational goals. Policies and practices for monitoring student progress and success in online courses are also diverse. Yet few states formally track or report student…

It is important to find the means by which struggling writers can find success in the English Language Arts. For students struggling with reading and writing, the visual arts may be a way of accessing and expressing their ideas and ultimately opening up a world of creative possibilities. This article explores drawing and painting as a pre-writing…

Character education has become one of the fastest growing reform movements in K-12 education today, partially in response to unacceptable levels of student misbehavior and inadequate endorsement of good character values (Williams 2000). Between 1993 and 2009, 36 states passed laws mandating or recommending some aspect of character education in…

From 2008 to 2010, project-based learning (PBL) was a major focus of the Teacher Leadership Institute (TLI), undertaken by the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE), as a method for teaching 21st century skills. Beginning in January 2011, a summative evaluation was conducted to investigate the effect of PBL implementation on teachers'…

In January 2010, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) identified Central Falls High School (CFHS) as one of the state's persistently lowest-achieving schools. The Central Falls School District (CFSD) and the Central Falls Teachers Union (CFTU) considered the transformation model but could not come to an agreement initially around…

The 2001 reauthorization of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)," represented a turning point in federal policy for the education of English Learners (ELs) in U.S. public schools. At the center of the changes in the 2001 reauthorization of the "ESEA" lie the English language proficiency (ELP) standards. These ELP…

In order to systemically improve student achievement in elementary literacy, a large urban school district partnered with a local university to develop a model for high-quality professional development that hopefully would result in long-term changes in teachers' literacy instructional/practices. Schools were selected based on their Adequate…

The integration of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) into the language arts classroom can greatly assist teachers meet the needs of diverse literacy learners. However, this new technology does not come without some concerns, including but not limited to ease of implementation, funding for new hardware and software, appropriate teacher support,…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to measuring effective teaching. The goal of the MET project is to improve the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals within states and districts--information that…

Do novice teachers effectively use teaching strategies they learn in a preservice course? This study examines how five novice intermediate (Grades 7-10) English language arts teachers implemented reader response journals, an instructional activity they learned about in their preservice English methods course. During interviews, they shared the…

This article reports on an action research project conducted in a public school in Bogotá, Colombia, with tenth grade students. We decided to develop it because of the students' needs as well as the em phasis of the PEI (Proyecto Educativo Institucional = School Institutional Project), which is based on the requisite of improving reading…

This report summarizes the results of the Newark, New Jersey, Striving Readers program for project Years 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. This report updates one analysis (3 years); the remainder of the impacts and implementation findings are for Year 4. The Striving Readers Grant addresses the unmet needs of middle school students reading 2 or more years below…

Classroom teachers in K-12 are expected to significantly integrate instructional technology into their teaching plans. Notwithstanding a need for technical know-how, what is the effect of one's beliefs and perceptions about the value of technology for improving and enhancing instruction on teacher's motivation and commitment to integrate these…

This article presents five activities that demonstrate developing thinking skills in students, uses comparable ELA and science skills. The thinking skills of Blooms Taxonomy are the organizer. Skills and processes gleaned from NYS ELA and Science Standards included in the article are: categorizing, comparing, following procedures, sequencing,…