This directory provides information about promising practices, ideas that work, strategies, and resources to improve education for all students in rural schools. The document contains the following articles from the literature: (1) "Motivation: It's Essential to Achievement" (Erling Clausen); (2) "Consolidate, Cooperate, or…

New teachers entering classrooms must have training and skills to merge today's technologies into learning activities and strategies that will stimulate and maintain student interest. Colleges of education must provide modeling of new and advanced technologies by professors and "hands-on" opportunities for students to become skilled in using…

This training guide provides guidelines and sample strategies for using the 1989 publication, "The Multigrade Resource Handbook," in a variety of professional settings ranging from teacher training programs to school and district inservice. This guide has been developed primarily for preservice teacher educators working with prospective…

This booklet provides an overview of IST (Individualized Study by Technology) programs at small, isolated rural high schools in Alaska, which use individualized microcomputer-based courses to provide a more complete curriculum. First, a general description is given of the IST program, which utilizes teachers, traditional texts, and printed…

Focusing on a two-year period, this informally written book describes the efforts of several rural elementary teachers to establish a writing center based on a unified language arts curriculum. The book relates the authors' background experiences, outlines the structure of the writing program, offers typical writing experiences and classroom…

In 1995 the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC), Richmond (Virginia) commissioned a study of alternative high school scheduling modules to determine the effects of different schedules on teaching strategies, teacher and student satisfaction, and student and school performance. This report presents the results of an analysis of the…

This theme issue on standards contains 11 articles written by teachers of English and language arts in Bread Loaf's primarily rural, teacher networks. These narratives describe how teachers in Alaska, South Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Arizona, and New Mexico are implementing state content standards while honoring local contexts for…

This study examines the meaning of teaching in rural, historically monocultural communities as it is experienced by teachers of color. This research project developed in three phases: (1) identifying; (2) observing teaching practices of; and (3) conducting a weekend focus group with a sampling of teachers of color working in middle and secondary…

This paper describes a teaching approach in which a middle school classroom teacher and a team-teacher by satellite present a course in Basic English and Reading for remedial reading students in grades 7-8. The team-teacher at Oklahoma State University is a "talking head" who teaches on television. The television portion of the course, "Reading in…

Six teachers from small and rural schools throughout the Northeast were selected as the 1990-91 Laboratory Fellows by the Regional Laboratory for Educational Improvement of the Northeast and Islands. These teachers were chosen for their exceptional strategies for incorporating multilevel grouping in their classrooms, grades 6-12. This publication…

In this collection, nine master teachers with extensive experience in small, rural Alaska schools describe classroom management techniques that have proven effective in their multigraded classrooms. Over half the document consists of one paper, the last in the volume, entitled "More like a School Family than Just a Teacher and His or Her…

This handbook was written to review current research on multigrade instruction, to identify key issues faced by multigrade classroom teachers, and to offer novice teachers a set of resource guides for improving instructional quality. The first chapter reviews previous research on multigrade instruction. It addresses questions regarding the effect…

A year-long study investigated the perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs of rural educators concerning gifted learners and their educational needs. Participants were all K-12 teachers (43) and administrators (3) in a single, rural southeastern Kansas school district serving 518 students. During the study, conducted in school year 1985, teachers…

Minicourses in astronomy and advanced calculus were offered to students in small rural high schools in New York via IBM PC microcomputers using the graphics tablet and associated software. New York state and local educational agencies, federal agencies, school districts, and two private sector telecommunications companies cooperated to demonstrate…

This study investigated the effect of locale, grade, and subject on instructional quality. Rural and urban teachers were observed teaching grades 4, 5, and 6 in social studies, mathematics, and language arts. It was hypothesized that teacher verbal behavior in a classroom predicated the quality and quantity of cognitive behavior of pupils. Rural…