As revenue uncertainties, an increased questioning of the value of higher education, and a decrease in the number of students graduating from high school have created a challenging landscape for higher education leaders, never has it been so important for colleges and universities to think like a business in order to attract and enroll enough…

This article describes a project for a university course on teaching language and literacy through a translanguaging lens. Through this project, preservice teachers (PSTs) were invited to design a "Virtual Classroom Tour" for a new multilingual learner (ML). The resulting multilingual, multimodal classroom tours became reflections of…

This article details the efforts of one program's collaborative efforts toward continuous improvement and strengthening partnerships with local school districts using Leadership-Focused Coaching, a research-based model for principal preparation programs. Practical experiences and lessons learned from the ongoing online program improvement and…

A core element of the proPIC project is the development and implementation of the so-called study weeks: a five day face-to-face stay abroad at one of the partner institutions in which all the participating students took part. In this chapter, the authors present and discuss the results and impact of these events which took place twice during the…

In this article, we describe the campus visit we organized for Latina girls (grades 6-12) that participated in Somos Escritoras/We Are Writers. Somos Escritoras is a creative space that invites Latina girls to explore their lives and examine their worlds through art, writing, and theater. We focus on the writing marathon we designed for our visit…

Recently, many local normal universities have been carrying out transformation and development project. Leshan Normal University, a local normal university, is prone to change traditional talents cultivation mode. By taking LSNU as an example, this paper attempts to make an exploration on constructing application-oriented talents training system…

This article outlines some of the policy issues currently faced by research-based universities in the Netherlands. The focus is on four leading universities (University of Amsterdam: UvA; Free University of Amsterdam: VU; Leiden University; and Delft University of Technology: TUD). The author visited these institutions as part of a Study Tour…

Every college struggles to create processes of quality assurance and continuous improvement to demonstrate and ensure its service to students and community. Accreditation is one avenue that ensures some uniformity across many institutions in the eyes of the public. While this paper focuses on accreditation processes and meeting the needs of…

Several federal grants prioritized the role of community colleges in education and training in recent years, and one of the most substantial investments was the Trade Adjustment Act Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program of the United States Department of Labor (DOL). Beginning October 2011, these $2 billion capacity-building…

In March and April 2014, the author travelled overseas on a 2013 Churchill Fellowship to study education programs that successfully engage and enthuse primary and middle school students in maths, engineering and science (MES) or science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) learning in schools, universities and institutions in the United…

As a National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Recommended Site Visitor, the author has had the privilege and pleasure to serve as an external program reviewer or consultant for a wide variety of NCHC member institutions--large research universities, small and midsize colleges, and two-year institutions--since 1998. His visits to nearly fifty…

In June 2007, the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) was awarded a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop the College Ready School Diagnostic, a web-based diagnostic instrument. The purpose of this tool is to provide individual school profiles and customized recommendations, enabling each institution to make…

The skies were threatening on the morning we visited Cranberry Station Elementary School in Westminster, MD. It had been raining nearly nonstop for two weeks and today did not look like an exception. Hopeful for a change in forecast, the kids all arrived at school dressed in their gym clothes and ready to participate in the school-wide Fun Run, a…

This is a brief report on the observations of the first official United States education mission to the U.S.S.R. The first mission was made possible by an Exchange Agreement negotiated by the U.S. Department of State and signed on January 27, 1958. The agreement authorizes exchanges in cultural, technical, and educational fields to promote mutual…