Students are often frustrated and confused by the study of leadership since the field cannot offer an agreed-upon definition of the construct. Students are expected to develop leadership skills without understanding what leadership actually is. The Leadership Exploration Project is a multiweek exercise that gives late undergraduate or graduate…

Nature-based early childhood education. Nature-based preschool. Nature preschool. Forest kindergarten. Nature kindergarten. Waldkindergarten. Forest school. These are a few of the program terms currently being discussed among early childhood environmental education professionals in the United States. Why is there so much discussion about the names…

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been a dynamic and growing enterprise for more than 25 years. During this period, PBS has expanded applications across a wide range of populations and multiple levels of implementation. As a result, there have been understandable inconsistencies and confusion regarding the definition of PBS. In this essay, we…

Competency-based education (CBE) is the hot new thing in higher education. While forms of CBE have been around since the 1970s, there has been a surge of interest in CBE, with more than 600 postsecondary institutions now reporting that they are either offering competency-based degree programs or are planning to do so. Similarly, institutional…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is having a moment. After years of being neglected for an agenda heavily focused on test scores, the pendulum is swinging back toward the whole child. The 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act asks states to develop at least one metric, outside reading and math scores, to measure…

Defining friction and asking what causes it might seem like a trivial question. Friction seems simple enough to understand. Friction is a force between surfaces that pushes against things that are moving or tending to move, and the rougher the surfaces, the greater the friction. Bill Robertson answers this by saying, "Well, not exactly".…

This chapter explains the meaning of meaning-making for the quarterlife generation. It describes what is called the meaning-quest--consisting of nine core meaning-making questions--and offers two examples of the pedagogy that the authors use in working with students.

College and University faculty members have increasingly adopted experiential learning teaching methods that are designed to engage students in the learning process. Experiential learning is simply defined as "hands-on" learning and may involve any of the following activities: service learning, applied learning in the discipline,…

The California Community Foundation's Promises That Count Initiative supports the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of College Promise efforts in Los Angeles County (L.A. County). Promises That Count activities will include research, technical assistance, the development of a professional learning community, and a series of…

This brief aims to catalog accelerated learning options available within and across secondary and postsecondary education. As we strive to create an education system that is responsive to the needs of all, we must foster pathways that afford students the opportunity to move through secondary and postsecondary education at an individualized pace…

The change in allowing school districts to use the more prevalent discrepancy model or the new addition of response to intervention to determine whether a disability is present has sparked discussion among educators. As districts decide which method to use, it is important to base decisions on factual and researched information. The authors hope…

In 1990 Helon Howell Raines published "Is There a Writing Program in This College? Two Hundred and Thirty-Six Two-Year Schools Respond," in which she reported on her study, via survey and eight follow-up telephone interviews, of two-year college writing programs across the country. Raines asked questions about departmental and institutional…

The author defines and describes authentic materials and discusses their benefits--citing the Input Hypothesis and the Output Principle in support of such materials--as well as some challenges of using authentic materials. Five categories of authentic materials are presented, and sources for materials and ways to use them in the EFL classroom are…

As the coauthor (with Susan Dean) of a formally for-profit and now open (i.e., free on the web) textbook, "Collaborative Statistics," this author has received many questions about open educational resources (OER), which can be summarized as follows: (1) What are OER?; (2) Why do you support, actively promote, and speak about OER?; (3) If a book is…

"Caring communities" is a great sounding line, but what does it really mean? There are many ways that communities which present themselves as caring make life easier or worse for those who live there. For centuries in Germany, there have been religious groups who claim to care for each member. By definition, this is circumscribed caring…