The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) mission is to enhance the understanding and appreciation of physics through teaching. Embracing the notion that physics understanding is critical to the wellbeing of society, AAPT is committed to serving its members and the larger community by promoting effectiveness in physics teaching for…

In Pakistan, there are 7,000 children in 70 jails. From observations on why children commit crime, the author offers that the core cause is poverty; 99 per cent of young prisoners belong to deprived sections of society. They do not have access to education; living in prison is difficult; the degrading and harsh treatment adversely affects the…

This paper describes quality enhancement (QE) focused response to the 2006 National Student Survey (NSS) by a post-1992 Higher Education Institution. Recognising the increasing importance of the NSS to a wide range of stakeholders, the University established a task team to explore, from a QE perspective, why the institution received particular…

This article describes the evolving stages of the establishment and development of a professional development school partnership. Whereas many such articles center on outcomes only, this one describes the developmental stages necessary to support a strong professional development partnership that allows for distributed learning for all parties…

The United States is becoming an increasingly diverse culture. To function in this diverse setting, health education students need opportunities to develop cultural competence. Cultural immersion service-learning courses are one way to meet this need. Using a combination of literature review and experiences with a cultural immersion…

Preschool teachers face increasing pressure to ensure that "all" children acquire the competencies they need to start on the path to becoming successful readers in the early grades, including children who may enter preschool with exceptionally weak skills. This article describes efforts to provide individually tailored supports to relatively…

The Modern Language Centre addresses a broad spectrum of theoretical and practical issues related to second and minority language teaching and learning. Since its foundation in 1968, the quality and range of the Centre's graduate studies programs, research, and development projects and field and dissemination services have brought it both national…

Implementation of patient safety initiatives can be costly in time and energy. Because of small volumes and limited resources, rural hospitals often are not included in nationally driven patient safety initiatives. This article describes the Tennessee Rural Hospital Patient Safety Demonstration project, whose goal was to strengthen capacity for…

The "Practice Notes" section is intended to keep readers informed about health education practice around the country. It is an attempt to spread the word about exemplary strategies, initiatives, and programs and share successes in overcoming obstacles or challenges. This article features two new programs on health education: (1) Project FIESTA;…

Stories are important resources in the repertoire of the teacher. Storytelling is a powerful way in which to communicate experiences and to explore ideas. Using stories, the teacher takes her students on journeys of discovery that introduce them to new vistas of lived experience. In this article, the authors describe how they have used…

This article reports on a family literacy program that began with the creation and implementation of a Welcome Center in an elementary school in the Southwest United States. This center was intended to be a place where recent immigrant students and their families, teachers, as well as other community members, came together to participate in…

It is the outstanding intellectual challenge of our age to find ways of providing citizens with access to and competent acquisition of the new applications and systems of knowledge. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it is to justify at the conceptual level that we are facing an unprecedented shift in the way knowledge is generated and…

This article describes an innovative practice in family involvement developed by one early care and education center engaged in professional development. The Hopes and Dreams Project documented family involvement in children's lives and education through the pairing of pictures and narratives about their lives, histories, priorities, goals, and…

Not too many years ago, right about the start of the new millennium, the TAMU-CC Writing Center began to pull away from the model of a center that focuses mostly on individual consultations and began to build a greater sense of the place of the Writing Center in the larger university Writing Community. In this article, we share how we have built…

The University of Delaware has a zero-tolerance policy for anything remotely resembling "hate speech." As such, the school implemented a mandatory training for all 7,000-odd students in its dorms. The sessions were part of a thorough thought-reform curriculum, designed by the school's Office of Residence Life, psychologically to…