This chapter introduces a University of Iowa effort to enhance and support active learning pedagogies in technology-enhanced (TILE) classrooms and three elements that proved essential to the campus-wide adoption of those pedagogies. It then describes the impact of those professional development efforts on the curricula and cultures of three…

Education has changed, and at no time is this more evident than when working with students who are tethered to the Internet, are fully engaged in technology-based social networking, create blogs and wikis, and expect instantaneous responses as they twitter with their peers around the world. Some of the knowledge and skills that millennial students…

For most of the last 50 years, teachers and administrators have perceived professional development and the instructional role primarily in terms of what one individual does with classes of others. Teachers, like their students, were considered to be rather passive acceptors of the instruction, rather than active modifiers. Thus, there was very…

A qualitative case study highlighting one rural Iowa elementary school provided insight into the issue of small schools without library programs as they are preparing to meet the Iowa reinstatement of the requirement for school library programs. The site was purposefully chosen because it has been operating without a school library program or…

As the responsibility for allocating resources for technology shifts from federal administrators to state and local education agencies, state and local policymakers face greater accountability for making fiscally and educationally sound decisions. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), the research and development arm of Learning…

This formative study is based on focus group interviews with nearly 200 teachers at 30 Iowa high schools during the spring of 1998. During the one-day site visits at each school, data was also collected from students, the principal, the technology coordinator (where available), and the district's technology plan. Teachers were asked about how they…

The Iowa Chautauqua Program was developed in 1983 with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) which awarded the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) a major grant to study an inexpensive in-service model for stimulating reform in K-12 science classrooms. Iowa was one of the six Chautauqua sites which were modeled after a program…

The Iowa-Scope, Sequence, and Coordination (SS&C) Program assists schools with reform of their entire middle school programs, grades 6-8, and features the science, technology, and society (STS) instructional approach. This reform translates to the creation of new frameworks for the school program and aims to produce "constructivist"…

Describes efforts in the reform of science education, noting the importance of changing preservice and in-service teacher education. The article examines three national systemic reform efforts and discusses implementation efforts in Iowa. It also discusses Iowa's teacher preparation and offers assessment information arising from Iowa's efforts.…