Committed to being a charter school with a professional learning community that empowers teachers, New Mexico's South Valley Academy (SVA) staff transformed its state evaluation process into a practitioner action research process (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007). While teachers self-diagnose growth needs and play active roles in improving…

Two former classroom teachers go back to the classroom to work, observe and discuss education. Their lessons learned include that grouping students according to ability is difficult, teachers are overworked, teachers must get to know each individual student, and most importantly, the separation between schools and the academic and policy…

School districts on the leading edge of the Birth through Third Grade movement have demonstrated unprecedented success raising the achievement of low-income students by developing coherent strategies focused on the early years of learning and development. These communities are not merely improving preschool. Rather, they are building aligned,…

Back on Track, developed by Jobs for the Future, is a design for schools to not only re-engage off-track and out-of-school youths to graduate from high school, but also to put them on a clear, supported path to a college education. Two schools that have combined Back on Track with the early college model, in which students can earn both a high…

Renaissance School is part of a network of Expeditionary Learning (EL) schools that was borne of a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound, USA. The EL model is centered on the Outward Bound ethic of having youth work together to achieve a task. EL schools take an approach to teaching and learning that…

Teachers' objections to an emphasis on narrative, descriptive evaluation and a de-emphasis on grades cannot rest on uninformed claims about what parents want. Decades of research show that grades don't lead to deeper understandings, increased intellectual risk-taking, or better performance on complex tasks. Similarly, conversations based around…

One of the most critical labor shortages facing the U.S. involves the number of young adults entering careers in what's now commonly referred to as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Equally troubling is that the participation of blacks and Hispanics in STEM careers continues to lag that of whites and Asians. High school is…

Whether a principal builds a structure of shared decision making, shared leadership, or not, teachers will have ideas and conversations about what they feel may be more effective. These conversations impact the entire culture of a school. When teachers have the opportunity to take ownership of decision making and planning, the ultimate decisions…

Homelessness is a complex and layered phenomenon, but schools can be effective in reducing its educational consequences. Schools currently are not doing enough. The next step is to consider the services that are needed for students as they arrive on the school campus. Taking care of homeless children in school systems involves seven provisos:…

Through the process of initiating, implementing, and sustaining a schoolwide professional learning community (PLC), teachers and administrators at the pseudonymous Silver Valley Middle School provide a powerful example of distributed leadership in action. New leadership roles, coordination, and interdependency among staff have led to an increased…

Seven elements found in professional development research are necessary for successful professional development programs. High-quality professional learning must be sustained, job-embedded, collegial, interactive, integrative, practical, and results-oriented.

What we're thinking about behaviorally challenging students and what we're doing to them requires a fresh look. When schools believe that parental discipline explains a child's misbehavior, educators are less likely to consider different explanations for the misbehavior and the full range of interventions that could be implemented at school. And…

We must reengineer both how we carry out educational R&D and the schools in which this work occurs if we want to achieve more productive ends. Education needs a Design, Educational Engineering, and Development infrastructure, which includes a rapid prototyping process by which researchers and practitioners co-develop innovations, try them in…

Researchers and practitioners need to exchange information in order for education research to become more useful. Practitioners need to develop more understanding of research and how to interpret its findings in light of local conditions. The What Works Clearinghouse, a project of the Institute for Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of…

School districts are moving toward a new form of management in which superintendents need to form and nurture leadership teams. A study of 25 such teams in Connecticut suggests that a team's effectiveness is maximized when the team members are coached by other team members, not the superintendent, and when they are coached on task-related…