To engage all learners, schools must offer career-pathway courses that combine academics and deeper learning. Gene Bottoms, until recently head of the Southern Regional Education Board, describes a transformation he believes must happen in US high schools--adopting curriculums that include intellectual rigor in career and technical education (CTE)…

This school-based study explored the role of collective and proxy efficacy beliefs in the performances of project-based learning teams comprising friends and acquaintances. Participants were 162 male students in Grade 8 who attended a Catholic high school, located in Sydney, Australia. Students were organized into 20 acquaintance groups and 21…

New research points to the future of education as online, student-centered, collaborative, and community-based--all largely absent from today's educational landscape. This timely guide shows middle, high school, and college students how to undertake research to address challenges in their curriculum and communities. The approach is deliberately…

Imposing a penalty for late or incomplete homework assignments, Dueck says, neither inspires learning nor provides accurate grades. Dueck lists four rules that a teacher must follow if penalties for inadequate homework are to be efficient in prodding students to do that work. The usual homework penalty structures violate each of these four rules.…

This article describes how adolescent students learn to question their lives and contexts through the "Crossing Boundaries" podcast assignment. In the assignment, the students pick a topic, design a project, interview at least one other individual, and analyze their data. The students do not realize they are engaging in original…

The authors of this article are two teacher educators who worked collaboratively to co-teach an interdisciplinary English and US history class to eleventh-grade students in an urban high school. They wanted to ensure the methods they were teaching preservice teachers were current and effective. The article discusses the foundational beliefs that…

As a teacher of struggling and resistant readers in high school, I searched for instructional practices that provided relevance, motivation, and engagement for my students as well as presented opportunities to become more aware of their challenges and priorities outside of school. Technology needed to be a part of the project to allow students…

Critical thinking continues to be an educational concern even though many school systems, educators, and academic articles have stressed its importance. To teach critical thinking, teachers need to learn what it is and how it is taught. It is unknown to what extent critical thinking skills are taught and assessed in classrooms. The purpose of this…

Research has pointed out that an over reliance on textbooks and lecturing in the social studies often devolves instruction into narrow perspectives and uninspiring activities. Thus, teachers allowed their students to use something they were interested in, technology, to access a wide range of resources for a class project. This assignment, the…

There has been an exponential growth in online courses offered at the high school level but little evidence as to whether they are as effective as face-to-face courses. It has become critical to understand and evaluate the effectiveness of online education in order to reap the benefits and reduce the drawbacks of contrasting learning modes. The…

The author believes that imagination is alive in the high school classroom, but it is pale and sickly, suffering from a long decline in which teachers have confined it to its most decorous forms of expression--inference and interpretation--and become ambiguous about whether or not it is truly welcome. To rouse imagination in the high school…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

Looking for a "habanero" (extremely hot) lesson to engage first-year Spanish language students in an in-depth study of Spanish-speaking countries? This article offers an overview of how the authors used 21st-century tools to get students excited about the not-so-new assignment of reporting on the people and culture of another country. Chances are,…

This article presents the results of a research project centered on challenged books, which was used with a twelfth-grade class of mixed ability levels. The study of banned books provided the students an opportunity to engage with literature on a number of levels, generating text-to-self connections by involving students in a discussion centered…

The connection between high school chemistry pedagogical experiences and introductory college chemistry performance has been a topic researched in published science education literature since the 1920s. However, analysis techniques have limited the generalizability of these results. This review discusses the findings of a large-scale,…