Founded in 1975 as a magnet school, Isaac Dickson school adopted the Foxfire approach in 1992. Instead of a one-size-fits-all process, students participate in planning their own learning, and teachers serve as facilitators, ensuring that each learner has developmentally appropriate subject matter and resources. Test scores verify that this…

Student teachers can learn to reform teaching by working with experienced teachers struggling to be reformers. Two approaches are (1) critical dissonance, or incongruity between what students learn in college and what they experience in student teaching; and (2) collaborative resonance, or intensifying the influences of both experiences by linking…

Describes a two-week visit to a private alternative secondary school near Seattle, Washington. The school is committed to holistic forms of learning through integrated and experience-based learning programs that allow students more freedom, trust, and responsibility than traditional schools. Academic structure is built around six core programs:…

This revised and expanded version of the 1960 classic "Summerhill," edited by Albert Lamb, portrays Summerhill School throughout its development. The book reveals A. S. Neill's fundamental belief in the self-regulated school in which children make their own rules and determine for themselves how much they will study. Neill's commitment…

Noting the fragile relationship between parent participation and school reform, this book tells the story of the Charquin Program, an alternative public school program in Hayward, California, dedicated to parent participation and notable for its open classroom structure and intensely democratic practice. The introduction relates the history and…

This document, which examines the use of educational technologies for distance education for adults in Canada, consists of five narrative sections and a bibliography. The first section introduces the topic and the document's objectives (to describe those technologies used in Canadian adult distance education, paying particular attention to those…

An overview of the history of nontraditional programs within the American higher education system discusses the energy and spirit provided by such programs and relates them to the basic principles of American culture (importance of individuality, respect for diversity, and belief in equality). During the development of American culture, the five…

Children whose primary school experience was consistently "open," consistently "traditional," or "mixed" (open education followed by traditional) were compared on a number of psychological variables. Subjects were 120 children, aged 10 to 11, from six primary schools in suburbs of London, England. The open classroom…

This case study focuses on the Forsokgymnaset, Oslo, (FGO), Norway, which came into being as a new type of school without any influence from lifelong education but whose features, especially the emphasis on students' responsibility for their own growth, are applicable to lifelong learning. Chapter 1, an introduction to lifelong education,…

This report is a case study of a federally-funded effort to implement comprehensive change in public education. Specifically, it examined the strategy of the Minneapolis public schools during the past five years to achieve this goal by creating a system of alternative schools, called Southeast Alternatives (SEA). Established as a separate…

Three alternatives for education in the future are presented in the paper, which was initially delivered as a university graduate school lecture. The author first describes three groups of children with different life environments--the advantaged, the silent majority, and the disadvantaged. The significance of possible educational alternatives is…

This report contains the results of two studies on the correlation of locus of control and nine measures of scholastic achievement for matched samples of students in two diverse educational environments. In the first study involving fifth grade children, the hypothesized significant positive relationship between internality and achievement was…

While youth and the world have changed greatly, most high schools have changed only slightly. School programs and settings can be opened, individualized, and dispersed, but still provide a sense of community, by adopting open education and open space. Perhaps the best known example of open education is Chicago's Metro High School: the city is its…

The intent of the evaluation studies reported here was two-fold: (1) to determine the promising practices of three alternative schools in Greater Cleveland, and (2) to determine which of those practices identified as promising would be feasible for incorporation into the public schools. Each substudy includes an overview, a description of the…

Project CREATES, an open school within the framework of a public school system, has been an attempt to develop a unique educational program with emphasis on role development of personnel and curriculum development. It is seen by parents and children as an important alternative to the self-contained classroom concept of education. Its goals have…