The first IDEA Public Schools' campus opened in 2000, just miles from the US-Mexico border in Donna, Texas. Fast-forward nearly two decades, and 79 IDEA public charter schools serve approximately 45,000 students across six regions, and those students consistently outperform their peers statewide on a range of metrics from proficiency to graduation…

Author Bob Meyer, head of the Fay School (Texas) compares professional development strategies in his school to programs in other schools, which he feels are mostly prescriptive in nature, and are based on a deficit model--focused on fixing, rather than developing--and, thus, are not always inspiring. Here Meyer describes the professional…

The well known 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" recommended that individuals preparing to teach should meet high education standards and demonstrate an aptitude for teaching and competence in an academic discipline--adding also that college and university teacher preparation programs should be judged by how well their graduates meet these…

Background: Inclusive STEM (traditionally known to stand for "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math") high schools are emerging across the country as a mechanism for improving STEM education and getting more and diverse students into STEM majors and careers. However, there is no consensus on what these schools are or should be,…

The work of schools is teaching and learning. However, the current educational culture is dominated by three characteristics: (1) the mechanistic view of organization and its practice based on the assembly line model where students progress along a value added conveyor; (2) the predominance of the Essentialist philosophy of education, in which the…

This study examines the effect varying models have on student understanding of fractions. The study addressed the question of what students know and understand about fractional concepts through the use of discrete and continuous models. A sample of 54 students in kindergarten and 3rd grade were given an interview pretest, participated in…

As faculty charged with the continued development and delivery of our college's capstone strategy course, we implemented a student-written, faculty-facilitated (SWIF) case project into the curriculum beginning in the spring semester of 2011. Our objective was to integrate three main areas of our professional lives: teaching (i.e. student…

In an era of increasingly hyped Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that seem to evoke feelings of both promise and peril for higher education, many institutions are struggling to find their niche among top-tier Ivy League schools offering courses to thousands of participants for free. While the effectiveness of MOOCs in terms of learning outcomes…

This article provides insights from a 2-year, cross-site evaluation of state funded developmental education sites and serves as a focus article for response by those sites. Receiving grants from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), nine sites (5 community colleges and 4 universities) implemented innovative developmental education…

The document is from a presentation at the Texas Region VII 2014 Curriculum Conference. The study examined the effects of a three-tiered high school program designed to increase student achievement and Texas end-of-course (EOC) TAKS and STAAR chemistry scores. The student sample (n = 625) consisted 75% high school sophomores and 25% high school…

This paper analyzes the influence of three different learning paradigms for learning literacy--formalist, cognitive-processing, and literacy practices--on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. It argues that the Common Core State Standards are based largely on a formalist paradigm as evident in the emphasis on teaching text…

If we are to attract more women and minorities to computing we must engage students at an early age. As part of its mission to increase participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing, the Increasing Student Participation in Research Development Program (INSPIRED) conducts computing academies for high school students. The…

The most effective pedagogies are those that foster students' metacognition and their learning effectiveness. This paper presents a new model of activity-based learning in which students construct knowledge using practices that include constructs of engagement, motivation, and affect that drive deeper processing and higher levels of metacognitive…

Federal and state policies have long sought to address the social inequities faced by limited English proficient (LEP) students through the improvement of English language acquisition. English language acquisition policy has focused on access to resources, qualified teachers, and instructional methodologies (e.g. pedagogy) that create a learning…

Because of the positive effects of learning communities with undergraduates, these researchers proposed the Collaborative Learning Initiatives that Motivate Bi-cultural experiences model (CLIMB) to implement learning communities within graduate counseling and educational administration courses. This article examines the concept of learning…