Trevor Greene, the 2013 MetLife/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year, empowers staff members and students to be the best teachers and learners they can be and provides the community resources to support them. In this article, Greene, principal of Toppenish High School in Washington, shares his biggest motivator as a school leader and…

Motivation, one of the leading problems in education, is an ongoing issue for teachers. Motivation is important because it highly contributes to achievement. Teachers have to be certain that their students are being motivated in order to develop a positive outcome. This article suggests some strategies to sustain students' classroom motivation.

Does the use of rewards to motivate children to learn or to follow classroom rules run counter to fostering a true desire for mastery? This column, which consists of two separate articles, provides the opposing opinions of the authors regarding the appropriateness of giving rewards in an early childhood classroom. In "Using Rewards in the Early…

Academic Development Program students face a special challenge. Within a few short weeks, they must hone their reading, writing, and speaking skills while scrambling to adjust to life in college. Usually, pre-freshmen enrolled in the Academic Development Program are not familiar with the demands of academic reading, writing, and oral response. For…

Interviews Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, the 2002 Teacher of the Year at Virginia Beach City Public Schools. Explains how Sheryl has pushed technology to its limits in an effort to help her students push their own limits. Contends that technology provides the perfect medium for offering children the chance to build their own experiences, construct their…

Students must learn how to empower themselves and how to empower others if they are to survive in modern organizations (corporate, educational, and governmental). Traditional bureaucratic pedagogies, to which many faculty are accustomed, neither teach nor develop these skills. Furthermore, the use of bureaucratic pedagogies limits student…

This paper investigates the importance of responsible teaching, examining how professionally empowered teachers can move students in the direction of becoming empowered and independent learners. It explains that empowerment is integral within teacher education. Teachers must provide minimum conditions for success in terms of responsible teaching…

Creating an empowering and positive classroom environment requires focusing on the processes of developing trust in self and others, participation and communication in the classroom. Establishing a classroom that accommodates diverse students who have varied backgrounds, interests, and preferences poses a challenging situation for university…

A teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) to adult migrant workers from Central America describes the evolution of her efforts to create a sense of community within the classroom and Latino center and to empower students to bring about social change in the long term. While students were pressuring the teacher to teach grammar, the teacher…

The choice theory holds that people can control only their own behavior, and that all people need a sense of belonging, freedom, power, and fun. This article argues that teachers must recognize that these needs motivate student behavior, and describes how a middle school turned its discipline and achievement problems around by using choice theory.…

An outdoor education course for six at-risk female students at an Ontario alternative high school demonstrates how a flexible, emergent course design based on the theories of critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, and adventure-based learning can affect student engagement and learning outcomes, and may be incompatible with the usual practice of…