Principals and superintendents are regularly required to write improvement plans. These are typically derided as being "left on the shelf" when they are supposed to be "living documents". The implication is that educational leaders are not working on their plans the way they are supposed to. Isobel Stevenson suggests that the…

New England colleges and universities are admired for their ability to marshal smart minds to tackle complex problems. This capacity has been evident throughout the pandemic, as their research, teaching and commitment to public service have demonstrated what they do best--chart new paths in the face of uncertainty. Analysis by the New England…

Many people view commencement from the outside: a wonderful celebration of academic achievement and a time to celebrate graduates' accomplishments. By contrast, the commencement coordinator analyzes and implements each of the smaller parts that culminate in graduates crossing the stage and throwing their caps. The perfect commencement is…

In this brief, the perspectives of special education administrators from Massachusetts and Indiana, who have been engaged in college-based transition services (CBTS), are shared. It summarizes the conversations they had during a fall 2019 Think College webinar and a follow-up discussion in summer 2020. Each administrator has had extensive…

In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" [Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, 2015 (EJ1057757)], we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local…

James Russo begins a discussion of the difficulty and time-consuming activity of Googling to find lesson plans and resources to keep his lessons more interesting and engaging, since such resources seem particularly scarce for math teachers. Russo writes that joining professional associations has given him ready access to higher quality resources…

College life is an exciting time for thousands of emerging adults on campuses across the nation. It is also an opportunity for students to engage in behaviors that can impede personal health. Numerous studies link personal health and wellness to academic achievement.1-3 The core mission of most institutions of higher education (IHEs) is academic…

Highlander Research and Education Center serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building. This article focuses on an interview with education coordinator Susan Williams who has worked at Highlander for 26 years. We discuss how others can and do create powerful popular education experiences anywhere, whether they have a…

In earlier days, craftspersons sustained by the experiences of countless generations embodied in a tradition were able to create extraordinarily appropriate artifacts. Today, these traditions have largely disappeared to make way for knowledge infrastructures whose "components" are the bodies of knowledge created, advanced, and applied by…

No matter how long teachers have been out of school, or how many children's literature classes they have taught, when summer comes, most of them long to "go back to class." It is because of the intriguing, exciting, reinvigorating institutes and conferences their colleagues offer in summer. In this interview, two veteran planners of summer…

A number of recently developed theories (e.g., the constructive episodic simulation, self-projection, and scene construction hypotheses) propose that the ability to simulate possible future events (sometimes referred to as episodic future thinking, prospection, or foresight) depends on the same neurocognitive system that is implicated in the…

The opening sentence in an article posted on edutechteacher.org titled "Video in the Classroom" states "In addition to being fun and motivating, video projects teach students to plan, organize, write, communicate, collaborate, and analyze (2012)." The author goes on to say "With the proliferation of webcams, phone cameras, flip cams, digital…

The REL Mid-Atlantic Webinar discussed the elements in a positive school climate and shared different methods for assessing school data, including the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory. The Q&A presented in this document address the questions participants had for Dr. Cohen following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…

The Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) provide a wide-ranging commentary and vision of the interrelationships among curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Specifically, they describe how the Berkeley Evaluation & Assessment Research (BEAR) Center Assessment System can be used to integrate and systematize these areas. This commentary focuses on…

Everybody loves the idea of children playing outdoors. Outside, children get to experience the seasons, challenge their minds and bodies, connect with the natural world, and form a special relationship with the planet. But in order for children to get the most of their outdoor time it is important that the environment be prepared by caring adults…