Last year, 15 students in the Montpelier (Vermont) High School's Advanced Placement Spanish class paid class-time visits every week to a nearby dairy farm. They interacted with the Mexican laborers by conversing with them in Spanish, having picnics together, and playing cards and soccer. As the students advanced their Spanish verbal skills, they…

Professional school counselors (PSCs) can play a vital role to help keep truant students in school by providing school-based interventions that target the personal barriers of attachment, engagement, and empowerment that may limit success in school. ASCA national standards encourage PSCs to demonstrate accountability for student outcomes. The…

The advertisements that flood everyone's visual culture are designed to create desire. From the author's experience, most high school students are not aware of the messages that they are bombarded with every day, and if they are, few care or think about them critically. The author's goals for this lesson were to increase students' awareness of the…

When approaches to critical inquiry and critical literacy are used by students to interrogate the dynamic between both fiction and nonfiction texts simultaneously, they shape a classroom culture of questioning that empowers students to take an informed and more activist stance about larger issues in the world. This article explores how nonfiction…

Reduce the number of discipline issues that arise in your math classroom with ideas from math education expert Jennifer Taylor-Cox. In this book, you'll learn a variety of ways to handle disruptive, disinterested, avoidant, and/or disrespectful students in K-12 math classrooms. Using realistic, case-by-case examples, the author reveals practical…

A pilot program in a public high school positions experienced student writing center tutors to become WAC liaisons who foster writing across the curriculum by raising questions, identifying needs, and providing support to their teachers with the goal of strengthening writing instruction school-wide. This article discusses the background and…

This study explored restorative justice arising in the context of an academic high school course in which students learned restorative justice principles and strategies. Given that the literature provided limited guidance of restorative justice in this context, these novel circumstances presented a unique opportunity for study. The central…

Despite the proliferation of women in higher education and the workforce, they have yet to achieve parity with men in many of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors and careers. The gap is even greater in the representation of women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This study examined pre-college intervention strategies…

In this article, Fairbanks, Crooks, and Ariail followed Esme Martinez, a Spanish-speaking Latina, from the sixth grade to the eleventh grade, focusing on her perspectives of schooling and her shifting identities related to home, school, friendships, and future. Drawing on the construct of artifacts, a sociohistorical concept that understands…

In the field of positive youth development programs, "empowerment" is used interchangeably with youth activism, leadership, civic participation and self-efficacy. However, few studies have captured what empowerment means to young people in diverse contexts. This article explores how youth define and experience empowerment in youth-led…

The overarching goal of the "Supporting Best Practices in Student Success Project" is to create, enhance, or expand successful programs that are replicable and can be scaled to greatly improve the percentage of underserved students who complete postsecondary education. In doing so, National College Access Network (NCAN) aimed to build…

As Coos County youth age, their attachment to their communities may deteriorate. This brief presents new data from the Coos Youth Study. This research indicates efforts to keep young people in Coos may benefit from efforts to show students that their views matter to adults in their communities. (Contains 8 figures and 10 endnotes.) [This work was…

Background/Context: School closure is becoming an increasingly common policy response to underperforming urban schools. Districts typically justify closure decisions by pointing to schools' low performance on measures required by No Child Left Behind. Closures disproportionately fall on schools with high percentages of poor and working-class…

Schoolwide support for higher achievement is essential. Students need a nurturing environment where they feel secure about learning, where the goal is success for every student and where students are confident they will receive mentoring and encouragement to prepare for their futures. Many schools are reinventing themselves to motivate students to…

Although typical transitions are from one vertical level of schooling to another, it is becoming increasingly common for transitions to also include moving between regular and alternative placements. Many high schools rely on alternate placements as a means of dealing with disruptive students. There is also a subcategory of placements for students…