The Native American Community Academy (NACA) is demonstrating an example of Indigenous philosophies and practices in education through its holistic, student-centered approach to education. NACA was one school in a large statewide study on Indian education in New Mexico. Focus groups with students, teachers, and community members illustrate the…

One of the goals of Project Onderbouw in the Netherlands is to develop an educational concept and curricula to be used in primary education. The educational concept adopted for the project is termed "developmental education." Based on neo-Vygotskian principles and other theoretical approaches, "developmental education"…

A recent model for the design of staff development programs for educators includes 5 stages--readiness, planning, training, implementation, and maintenance--each of which is defined by a set of 4 to 11 practices. To test this model and the relative merits of its 38 practices and its underlying assumptions, a national questionnaire survey of over…

Exposure to the Reggio Emilia approach has led to greater awareness among early childhood educators of the importance of the arts, project work, and documentation. To be successful in integrating visual arts, teachers need to acquire the knowledge and skills for working with the arts and experience a wide range of art materials, methods, and…

An inquiry-based early childhood education (ECE) program focusing on the development of representational competence, guided by principles from Piagetian theory, and based on Sigel's (1970) distancing hypothesis is described, and issues of program evaluation are discussed. Principles and aims of the ECE program are stated, including, among others,…

A study examined experiential education programs in terms of how they developed participants' personal agency, sense of belonging, and levels of competence. Personal agency empowers students to become change agents in their lives and communities; sense of belonging enables participants to see themselves as members of a community with rights and…

This paper examines parental involvement, regardless of socioeconomic status and ethnic or racial differences, in a school-university partnership in an elementary school in San Antonio, Texas, where the Alliance School is involved in a partnership with a local Holmes Group university. First described is the history of the school, followed by a…

Two secondary out-of-school activities were evaluated to determine how well each met rigorous definitions of curriculum. It was found that the activities--a whitewater canoe trip and a series of 3 10-day expeditions to a boreal forest, a subarctic area, and a mountain setting--both met the criteria for curriculum including intent of the teacher to…

Describes the conceptual framework for an urban Montessori high school in Holland in 1945. Includes information on implementing fundamental Montessori principles, scheduling, materials, organization of subject matter, use of group mentors, and democracy in school. Focuses on how the school increases adolescents' moral strength with living and…

This study probes more deeply on defining the "reform agenda" and answering the question, "How do coaches balance pushing the reform agenda and meeting the immediate needs of school staff?" This study first teases apart what coaches mean by "reform agenda" and "immediate needs." The term "reform…