Emerging research points to the importance of developing the capacities of teachers to help their students to be creative risk takers and to learn from productive failure. Facilitating this creative risk taking in learners has been shown to require expertise and a degree of risk taking on the part of both teachers and educational leaders. This…

Interdisciplinary teams with common planning time have been a hallmark of the middle school organizational structure since the 1960s, yet research on the effective use of common planning time is limited. This study explores how interdisciplinary teams at schools designated Kentucky Schools to Watch use common planning time, including the factors…

This paper outlines current theories of teacher practice that seek to promote equity from critical perspectives, and contributes to the empirical research on critical mathematics equity practice. Part of a larger study of equity and mathematics teacher practice in an urban public school, this paper reports specifically on the involvement and…

State policies to equalize educational spending, cap bond and levy rates, require common teacher salary schedules, and consolidate school districts are geared toward improving quality and attempting to resolve problems of inefficiency. However, despite the use of state policy to equalize educational quality, educational gaps persist. Yu and Lau…

The "Standards" of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) were established as a broad framework to guide reform in school mathematics, not as a specific curriculum. Whether the implementation of the NCTM standards in classrooms has a relationship to student anxiety about mathematics was studied. Student levels of…