The first year of teaching has and continues to be fraught with challenges for early educators in public school contexts across the United States. A persistent problem that has been documented across the globe is the ability of novice teachers to engage in developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) with their students. We examine this issue…

More than 2,300 teachers in 241 schools across 25 states participating in a professional development approach to character education classroom management known as Development Designs 1 and Developmental Designs 2 (DD1 & DD2) were studied throughout the 2008-2009 academic school year. Data from this longitudinal program evaluation indicate that…

This paper presents a professional development model to support the implementation of word study in the middle school grades. The first section provides a rationale and considerations for the model. The following section discusses the theory and instructional methods of word study focusing on word sorting and word hunts. To confirm the…