Claudia Gallindo and Mavis Sanders describe what they've learned from their research about how full-service community schools connect with families and communities. These schools acknowledge that students have needs that go beyond that need and attempt to address those needs and serve as a hub for the community. The current movement goes beyond…

Experience with the Child Development Project shows that poorly implemented community building may be detrimental to students. Caring is not synonymous with "easy"; teachers are pivotal in student-centered classrooms; schoolwide change is essential; school values must be examined; and assessment must be aligned with instruction.…

A caring, effective style of classroom management has transformed a Chicago elementary school. The Responsive Classroom approach acknowledges children's need to feel pleasure and significance as members of a classroom community via morning meetings, rules and logical consequences, guided discovery, classroom organization, academic choice, and…

Teachers and education professors suggest various nonfiction and fiction books for summer reading enjoyment, from Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," C.A. Bowers's "Let Them Eat Data," and Larry McMurtry's "Roads: Driving America's Great Highways" to Kent Hauf's "Plainsong, J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace," and Michael Cunningham's "The Hours." (MLH)

A study of 24 Friends high schools nationwide concluded that conflict is the cruciform spawning individual moral growth and the primary locus for moral growth in adolescents. Instead of avoiding conflict, educators must engage students in responses to conflict that are nonviolent, creative, and peace-promoting. (MLH)

Redesigning education to recreate an ecologically sustainable community is a critical societal need. Educators should focus not on technological fixes, but on formulating new cultural assumptions. As Wendell Berry realized, genuine improvement will begin only in the country. Rural schools should stop emulating urban and suburban schools and attend…

Discusses issues defining the boundaries of the current accountability debate, focusing on the historical struggle between the ideas of philosopher John Dewey and psychologist Edward Thorndike. In the Thorndike camp, corporate America wants educators to continue to sort, select, and label children, aided by standardized testing. The…

The capstone of a Mennonite school's building community curriculum is its senior public presentation, part of a required nine-week communications course. These 15- to 20-minute presentations before an audience of faculty, parents, and friends allow seniors to reflect on high school experiences. Students share their academic, spiritual, and…

To foster community among students, teachers require training that gives them a positive community experience and equips them with experience-based pedagogical and curricular tools. Stanford University's Experiential Curricula Project embodies five principles: moving from students' experience to theory; engaging students in common projects;…

Compares pedagogical practices in an eighth-grade middle school classroom with those a of one-room Amish school studied in an earlier work. Taken together, the two settings suggest that one must seek "the present status and performance of the U.S. education system" not in the usual indicators, but in the contradictory beliefs and…

Deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill failed because proper implementation required large-scale societal changes. Dumping disabled kids into regular education without appropriate supports could mirror that fiasco. Inclusion can help create a sense of community through promoting acceptance and respect among classmates. The Social Awareness-Social…

Discusses evolutionary stages in the education establishment's reaction to charter schools: stopping them cold, keeping them few and weak, competing with them, and accepting and using them. Charters are not revolutionary. They embody three time-tested features: community rootedness; resemblance to magnet and alternative schools; and institutional…

As suggested by standard indicators--truancy, dropout rates, graffiti, vandalism, violence--youngsters in small schools rarely display the anger at the institution and its inhabitants that typifies Columbine and many other comprehensive high schools. Educators must cultivate learning communities and qualities (like empathy and compassion)…

Current educational reform proposals are fixed on modifying existing structures and lack imagination. Cooperative learning and individualized instruction are time-worn "innovations" treating the symptoms of a terminally ill system. This article presents 32 transitions to transform education into a world-based, teacherless experience featuring…

Reviews 30 years of research, concentrating on ongoing reform initiatives and 18 programs designated as effective with at-risk students. Identifies broad, overarching conditions essential for transporting isolated successes to all schools serving at-risk students. Outlines key characteristics of two promising models: community in schools and…