Today's educational structures require teachers to move from isolation to collaboration to improve knowledge, skills, and instructional practices for effective teaching and learning. To do this, many schools across the United States have implemented professional learning communities as the framework for collaboration. The purpose of this framework…

This article discusses how a bottom-up approach to learning can be positioned within a top-down educational structure. For the first time, Iran's educational system has witnessed a shift from a one-dimensional teacher-centered approach to the triangular student-facilitator-parent approach. While the majority of children's participative activities…

The purpose of this research was to examine the practice of unschooling in the day-to-day life of homeschool students and present a portrait of the homeschooling experience. At this point in the research, the unschooling will be generally defined as homeschooling with no set scholarly curriculum. The research design methodology was portraiture.…

The simple gesture of a home visit--where the focus will be on the child and not on academics or classroom behavior--pays huge dividends, say teachers. A teacher who has met a student's parents in their home is better equipped to reach that child and keep him or her on track through the year. Home visits are common, if not mandatory, in charter…

The debate concerning who teachers are and what they are supposed to do continues with similar fervor as 100 years ago. In today's political climate, there is a resurgence in essentialism (a focus on traditional instruction and teacher-led curricula). As our nation's teachers face the demands of accountability standards imposed by recent…

The current education model in the United States, a relic of the Industrial Age, is increasingly out of touch with the needs of society and the students it serves. The traditional model of education--where a teacher imparts knowledge to students through lecture and students recite memorized facts and solve fundamental math and science problems to…

Context: What Varenne and McDermott described as "conventional schooling" is characterized by underlying values of competition and credentialism implicit in an unconscious, cultural framework for U.S. institutional schooling. Schools that define themselves in opposition to this cultural heritage consider themselves innovative schools and…

Education reform often appears a zero-sum battle, one that pits crusaders demanding accountability and choice against much of the traditional education establishment, including teachers unions. The political skirmishes in Florida, including court fights over vouchers and charter schools, and ongoing struggles over a parade of different merit pay…

Western intellectual heritage is characterized by a gradual but significant shift from a supernatural to a naturalistic worldview between 1880 and 1920. With the ascendancy of naturalistic worldview, various conflicting ideas emerge about the place and proper function of the family and the educational institutions. The social and legal…

To adult educators, Grundtvig is of importance as the originator of the folk high school, which he felt strongly must be a center of liberal education, a "school for life." He was greatly impressed by the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited around 1830, but he realized that they were a preserve of a privileged…

Whether open education is an old friend in new dress or a radical take-off to success remains to be judged through appropriate research. Reassurances are made that open education has the same (and better) goals than does the traditional approach. (Editor/RK)

Examines the ways that a "pedagogy of obedience" has been institutionalized as a dominant form and concern of educational practice in the United States. Details one set of institutional mechanisms defining what it means to learn in school, in general, and to regulate what constitutes acceptable acts of reading and writing, in particular.…

Today varied notions of good teaching are mired in fruitless, "cheesy" debates over traditional versus progressive philosophies. On the "Velveeta" side is John Locke, who viewed children as a "tabula rasa" (empty slate). On the brie side is Rousseau, who emphasized freeing the child as "noble savage." The…

The self-contained classroom tends to emphasize achievement of basic skills, while the open-concept school emphasizes attitudes and feelings. A brief historical review presents the history and explains the philosophy behind the open-concept school. This is followed by a review of the literature and an analysis of the present status of the concept.…

The educational and social heritage of India has limited the development of creative spontaneous minds needed to meet the changes of the 20th century. The formal, irrelevant education, confined to the earlier years of an individual's life may only prepare him for a minimum of seven to 15 years of work during his adult life. Because India presently…