In Israel, the Ministry of Education determines all aspects of educational policy, including teachers' initial teacher education, licensing and professional development. As part of the New Horizon educational reform, the Ministry announced in 2010 a new plan for the professional development of teachers in Israel. The Ministry assigned a mediating…

Purpose: Many countries throughout the world provide all children with free education. However, sometimes there are user charges in publically funded schools worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore parental participation fees in school expenses in Israel, depicting the current situation and analyzing its implications.…

Taking a student's perspective, this study aims to characterize students' descriptions of teaching higher and lower in mastery goal emphasis, in elementary, middle, traditional, and democratic schools. Data were collected by student surveys and interviews from fifth- through eighth-grade Israeli students. Nineteen interviews, describing 5 science…

The current study was set to examine the role of school principals in Israel in the professional development process of their teachers following the implementation of a new professional reform. 159 teachers and 13 principals responded to a questionnaire designed to collect data concerning the involvement of principals in initiatives developed by…

This article explores the approach to transformative education utilized by Sadaka Reut, a binational civil society organization in Israel that works with Jewish and Palestinian youth. I examine three central tools Sadaka Reut uses to achieve its goal of educating youth for social change: using personal experiences as the basis for discussion;…

This study suggests an integrative qualitative methodological framework for capturing complexity in mentoring activity. Specifically, the model examines how historical developments of a discipline direct mentors' mediation of professional knowledge through the language that they use. The model integrates social activity theory and a framework of…

The literature on Teacher's Guides combines knowledge of discipline-related content and pedagogy-related content in reference to the objectives and contents of the Ministry of Education curriculum. It serves as a self-study tool that provides guidelines of how to teach in light of the various changing goals and needs of the teacher. The corpus on…

Against the backdrop of growing conflicts in Israeli society and concerns about its democratic character, the current curriculum guidelines and official textbook for civic education in Israel were set to offer a more inclusive civic education that would stress ideas such as pluralistic and democratic citizenship. However, this curriculum does not…