A steward of the discipline was originally defined as "someone who will creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application". This construct was articulated to support and strengthen doctoral education. The purpose of…

International research documents a variety of approaches for fostering the professional development of principals. These studies mainly draw upon survey and interview data. Less attention has been paid to observing professional development processes. This article aims to examine how professional learning is played out empirically in the…

School systems have access to more data than ever before, but most teachers and school leaders lack the skills to use the data for student and school improvement. Current attempts to use data have lacked depth and have been more focused on accountability and meeting state and federal requirements than on systematically investigating the factors…

The pace of implementation of PBIS in restrictive settings for juvenile offenders is accelerating. Recommendations for future research include the following: examine effects of PBIS on preventing entry into the school-to-prison pipeline, identify factors that influence PBIS implementation, develop the capacity of restrictive settings to engage in…

States wrestling with the challenge of increasing community college student completion rates recognize that a critical next step is building support among faculty for reform efforts. Faculty can play a crucial role in bridging the historic divide between policy and practice. Empowering faculty to take a substantive role in informing policy…

Data on student achievement are increasingly being used to support effective policy and practice, and to move education systems towards more evidence-informed approaches to large-scale improvement. In this paper, we outline strategies used in Ontario, Canada to create, enhance and apply a range of data to support educational improvement. These…

Despite the growing volume of research on data use systems or data use activities in which teachers engage, micro-process studies--investigations of what teachers and others actually do under the broad banner of "data use" or "evidence-based decision making"--remain substantially underdeveloped. Starting with a review of the…

Although Early Head Start (EHS) is a federal-to-local program, there are opportunities for collaboration at the state level that have expanded in recent years. State leaders can seize opportunities to break down silos and create collaborative state systems and programs to better meet the needs of vulnerable young children in their states. This…

The federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, to which $3 billion were allocated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), supports schools attempting to turn around a history of low performance. School turnaround also is a focus of Race to the Top (RTT), another ARRA-supported initiative, which involved a roughly $4…

The "all children can learn" call to action made no exceptions when it appeared on the educational landscape, and educators began to shift their thinking to ensure that students with disabilities were challenged in academic achievement. Two federal mandates, not only No Child Left Behind (NCLB 2001) but also the Individuals with…

Although data driven-decision making has been the mantra of school reform for the last 10 years, school leaders benefit from frequent discussions in how to engage teachers in the process. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to apply Reeves' (2004) framework concerning Antecedents of Excellence in creating a school culture that routinely uses…

The report examines the initiatives of state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the Virgin Islands) to support data-driven decisionmaking in districts and schools and describes the service providers hired to support this work. Four…

The report examines the initiatives of state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region to support data-driven decisionmaking in districts and schools and describes the service providers hired to support this work. Four components of data-driven decisionmaking initiatives are identified: (1) Centralized data system/warehouse; (2) Tools…

The Urban Professional Development School (PDS) Network represents a group of professional educators from a large, urban university and six public and private schools in the same metropolitan area committed to providing progressive models of professional development for teachers across the lifespan. This paper demonstrates how participants in this…

This study explored how teachers and school administrators connect large-scale assessment results with school improvement planning. Using a semi-structured format, 20 teachers and 17 administrators were interviewed from two school districts in southern Ontario, Canada. The interview protocol contained a range of questions related to teaching and…