A leadership academy is a formal professional learning opportunity for current school leaders, focused on augmenting knowledge and skills, increasing specialization, and refreshing leadership practices. States interested in supporting leadership academies through federal or other funding sources can look to current models of leadership academies…

Achieving the Dream colleges engage in a process of institutional improvement to increase student success. A central component of this process is engaging internal and external stakeholders to help develop and implement interventions or changes in programs and services that improve student success. To determine whether these interventions do…

In this companion to "Opening Doors", Friedman and Webb provide more helpful, hand-on tips for bringing SEM to life in your school. Readers learn, step-by-step, how to create a schedule that includes a weekly E-Slot for enrichment learning experiences as well as ideas for injecting interest-based experiences into the E-Slot, regular curriculum,…

A framework for reflecting on, assessing, and improving institutional quality in higher education focuses on internal and external approaches to educational quality and their implications for designing for quality and continuous quality assessment. (MSE)

Assisting disseminators to evaluate their efforts at improving education through effective practices and products is the aim of this guide. Offering suggested approaches within a framework, it attempts to work with objectives already defined, rather than helping with writing objectives. Given in five parts: (1) introduction and overview; (2)…

Educators devoted to school reform focus all too often on the isolated components of K-12 education. The author of this book contends that the focus really should be on the interdependence of variables that affect student learning, both inside and outside the classroom. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 introduces the Four Cycles Model…

Advisory groups have played an essential role in improving the school climate and conditions for young adolescents in schools. How middle school decision makers go about the process of designing or re-designing an advisory program needs to be considered. A discussion is presented of the background information that helps define advisories. It…

When faculty evaluation systems are proposed, students, faculty, and administrators often think only of questionnaires and assignment of data-processing tasks. Much more must be considered, including balancing the needs of all constituencies, designing student-rating forms and administration procedures, and the treatment and uses of the…

The purpose of the federally funded Title I program is to help disadvantaged students meet the same high academic standards expected of all children. The most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This education bill was enacted on January 8, 2002 and has established…

Self-assessment leads to stronger performance in the nation's colleges and universities. That's the premise of "Excellence in Higher Education," a model self-assessment program that has earned accolades from the higher education community. Based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award framework, the fourth edition of this bestseller is the…

Self-assessment leads to stronger performance in the nation's colleges and universities. That's the premise of "Excellence in Higher Education," a model self-assessment program that has earned accolades from the higher education community. Based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award framework, the fourth edition of this bestseller is the…

The Teacher Quality Toolkit addresses the continuum of teacher learning by providing tools that can be used to improve both preservice, and inservice teacher education. Each chapter provides self assessment tools that can guide progress toward improved teacher quality and describes resources for designing exemplary programs and practices. Chapters…

Consistent with educational reform efforts, the Quality Performance Assessment (QPA) Process Module was designed to disseminate information about the QPA Process, and to be a training vehicle so that members of the Kansas State Board of Education Outcomes Education Team and the Kansas education community might have the knowledge base necessary to…

This handbook for administrators of school district mathematics programs outlines a set of procedures for implementing the Pennsylvania Comprehensive Mathematics Plan (PCMP) and provides a degree of standardization and a planning framework to encourage the communication of related ideas and successes. The procedural steps, instruments, checklists,…

This paper examines how to encourage widespread adoption of comprehensive school-reform models--adoption outside the schools and districts that took part in the development process. It refers to such models as "design-based" schools. The paper defines what is meant by a school design and describes receptive school and district…