Few formal post-secondary educational programs in the United States focus on youth work, thus youth workers often enter the field with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of experience working with youth. Drawing on mounting evidence that quality youth service requires skilled staff, professional-development opportunities have received…

Teacher leadership has gained attention in recent years as a plausible means by which educational reform and instructional improvement can be accomplished through ongoing, site-based professional development for teachers. This article reviews and draws conclusions across the research literature on professional development and teacher leadership to…

Intel Teach to the Future was designed to provide a professional development experience that would prepare teachers to use technology with their students. The developers of the Intel Teach to the Future program began with two equally weighted goals, one related to the type of impact they wished to have and one related to the scale of impact. The…

Maintains that the United States tolerates an ineffective system of early education and professional preparation. Notes challenges to the field, including insufficient teacher preparation, outdated teacher professional development approaches, ineffective use of research findings to improve early childhood programs, and failure to understand,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report the formative evaluation results from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Healthy School Communities (HSC) pilot project. Design/methodology/approach: This study utilized 11 HSC pilot sites in the USA (eight sites) and Canada (three sites). The evaluation question was…

More high quality child care is needed in the United States. This article evaluates the Better Kid Care (BKC) program produced by Pennsylvania State University Extension. Child care staff in Wisconsin were interviewed about changes they had made in their early childhood programs following participation in the BKC program. Findings show that 2…

This country has few highly qualified personnel to fulfill the various state commitments to legislation mandating effective vocational programs for two special populations, i.e., persons discriminated against on the basis of racial/ethnic identity and the physically handicapped. The result of a lack of national policy in this area has been a…

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is the latest development in a long history of standards-based-reform in the United States. As of November 4, 2011, 46 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new curricular standards, called the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These states and the District of Columbia are now implementing…

Policy shapes practice, and the increasingly important realm of professional development is no exception. In order to identify effective professional development policies and strategies, a Stanford University research team examined the policy frameworks supporting high levels of professional development activity in four states. The…

In this report of a phenomenological study, the co-director of a U.S. early childhood program describes and reflects on the interrelationship of his collaborative work with teachers, staff members' documentation of children's work and school events, and his own professional development activities. The author presents and discusses three events…

Improving professional learning for educators is a crucial step in transforming schools and improving academic achievement. To meet federal requirements and public expectations for school and student performance, the nation needs to bolster teacher skills and knowledge to ensure that every teacher is able to teach increasingly diverse learners,…

This document brings together a series of short papers that examine 20 educational issues affecting all 50 states in the U.S. The following issues are addressed: (1) accountability, with an emphasis on performance-based accountability systems and state-performance indicators; (2) alternative schools for disruptive students; (3)assessment,…

This document contains 11 papers on researching service learning through a multidisciplinary lens. The following papers are included: "Introduction" (Shelley H. Billig, Andrew Furco); "Stretching to Meet the Challenge: Improving the Quality of Research to Improve the Quality of Service-Learning" (Janet Eyler);…