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,…

Combining the Copernican Plan (a block-schedule variation) and year-round schooling may make both proposals more palatable to the general public. Since the plan leaves facilities, teacher contracts, and current budgets virtually unchanged, serious public resistance is unlikely. Principals should first introduce Copernican scheduling and then use…

The public has a legal right to produce and broadcast programs on public-access cable stations; educational stations are free to determine which programs they broadcast. Since 91% of Americans watch television daily, educators could use that medium to improve public understanding of their roles. A Yonkers program is described. (MLH)

The Massachusetts charter movement facilitated Boston's development of pilot schools (in-district charters), which posed a dilemma for staff, students, board members, and codirectors of Fenway Middle College High School. A year later, a coalition of pilot school leaders is glad they stayed in the system and pursued high-level educational…

Concerned about the serious underrepresentation of culturally different students in gifted programs, the Palm Beach County (Florida) Schools developed a pilot project that established a system for identifying minority students with potential and for designing a course of study to meet their educational needs. The program featured enrichment,…

A program using professional-development support teams in lieu of a traditional formal evaluation system has certified staff members in Santa Cruz, California, schools feeling more positive about a formerly meaningless, demoralizing process. Key program elements include choice, support, stimulation, trust, and respect for peers' judgment. Teacher…

Teachers in Denver recently approved a historic revision to the teachers' contract, in which compensation is linked, in part, to student success in the classroom. If voters fund the proposed contract in fall 2005, it could mark a new era in which teachers and communities formally accept a range of indicators that can be used to determine the…

Teachers generally feel that the evaluation models surfacing in response to state and national mandates are monistic, mechanistic, and inappropriate. Based on North Carolina's experience with the Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument, an alternative instrument comparing teachers' suppositional and propositional pedagogical styles was created.…

Despite promising research findings and enthusiastic participants, multiyear teacher/student relationships remain uncommon in U.S. schools. The multiyear approach offers great potential for summertime learning. Ambitious pilot programs in Attleboro and Worcester, Massachusetts, and West Bloomfield, Minnesota, are briefly described. (MLH)

An educational program, conducted at the Nassau County Jail in New York, enables youthful offenders to complete their high school education. (MF)

Describes a 1981-82 pilot project in the use of computers in grades one through eight by six schools in two suburban Washington, DC, school districts. Despite "the many obstacles and barriers to computer literacy," three of the six schools made "amazing progress." (JBM)