Demetrius Fuller developed the HOMies, eight characters who represent eight habits of mind for learners, while he was an art teacher at a Massachusetts elementary school. When students began talking about the HOMies outside their art class, the initiative spread across the school. Linda Nathan, Demetrius Fuller, and Nate Meyers describe the HOMies…

Research has shown that traditional ways of promoting family involvement in school are often ineffective, especially among families whose approach does not align with the middle-class child-rearing practices embraced in many U.S. schools. To encourage greater family involvement, a Colorado school district is piloting a program in which educators…

Nearly all states have standards for student learning and they have assessment programs to measure students' proficiency on those standards. But schools within each state nonetheless are left to develop their own standards-based student report cards as the primary means of communicating information about students' performance. To address the…

Full-release mentoring programs draw successful mid-career teachers away from classrooms, with the inherent risk that they will decide not to return to classroom teaching, thus eliminating the opportunity for future students to benefit directly from their expertise. This might be enough for some districts, particularly those struggling to retain…

Most children who do not learn to read during the primary grades will probably never learn to read well. Children who reach the end of third grade with low literacy skills typically have less access to the regular curriculum, require long-term support, and fall further behind their peers in literacy achievement and curricular knowledge. However,…