For more than 25 years, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership has provided the youth mentoring field with a set of researched-informed and practitioner-approved practices for creating and sustaining positive and impactful mentoring relationships and strong program services. The fourth edition of "The Elements of Effective Practice for…

Reflective practice supports critical thinking and assessment skills through analyzing one's own life experiences, and the role of reflection in learning has been long recognized. However, drawbacks of many reflective practice assignments are their broad scope and lengthy written requirements. I propose that the reflection process is robust enough…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce, describe, and document the methods involved in the preparation of a mindset intervention built into a freshmen development course, and established after years of longitudinal research, that is designed to have a positive impact on the outlook, achievement, and persistence of first generation…

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) collaborated to produce a summary of two roundtable discussions on the critical relevance of child and adolescent development research to teacher preparation practices. The participants in the roundtable…

Spirituality is an important aspect of counseling. This paper identifies spirituality as a task that is a journey universal to human beings. It presents a taxonomy of spirituality/consciousness developed by Render and Lemire, postulating five levels of taxonomy: self, others, groups, the world, and cosmic. These levels apply across cultural,…

Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…

The lives of 505 individuals born in 1955 on the island of Kauai (Hawaii) were followed from the prenatal period to adulthood to elucidate their resilience in the face of childhood adversity or their recovery in later years. The Kauai Longitudinal Study monitored the impact of a variety of biological and psychosocial risk factors, stressful life…

As part of a high-risk youth grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a survey was developed and implemented to assess knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of seventh-grade students toward alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATODs). In addition to assessing project outcomes, this activity…

A personalized model for faculty development and a case study demonstrating its utilization are presented. The increasing need for stronq faculty development programs is noted with specific reference to the increasing numbers and varying types of college students. To respond effectively to the needs of this burgeoning student clientele, provisions…