This virtual conference took place from September 28 to October 3 on UNESCO-UNEVOC's e-Forum and brought together 165 participants from 57 countries. This virtual conference was the twelfth in a series of moderator-driven discussions introduced by UNESCO-UNEVOC in 2011. Conducted on the UNEVOC e-Forum--a global online community of over 4,000…

Innovation is often driven by crisis, and Rutter (2011) began her chapter by reminding everyone of the crisis confronting the United States in the early 1980s and how that provided impetus for the development of professional development schools (PDSs). In a complementary companion chapter, Neapolitan and Levine (2011) take the reader through…

Various approaches to the professional development school (PDS)--each designed for its respective audience, mission, and purpose for engagement--have shaped the professional development school effort during the past 25 years. Central to these approaches is improving teacher quality in the service of student learning. This provides direction for…

The purpose of this report is to review the literature on theoretical frameworks, best practices, and conceptual models for the 21st century collegiate writing program. Methods include electronic database searches for recent and historical peer-reviewed scholarly literature on collegiate writing programs. The author analyzed over 65 sources from…

The purpose of this position statement is to promote excellence in early childhood education by providing a framework for best practice. Grounded both in the research on child development and learning and in the knowledge base regarding educational effectiveness, the framework outlines practice that promotes young children's optimal learning and…

This paper outlines key features of good distance education, drawing upon principles for good practice in undergraduate education and recorded experiences with distance learning programs in a number of content areas. The first section defines distance education and provides a historical perspective. Five interrelated phenomena that have…

Online learning through virtual schools is one of the most important advancements in attempting to rethink the effectiveness of education in the United States. The virtual school provides access to online, collaborative and self-paced learning environments--settings that can facilitate 21st Century skills. Today's students must be able to combine…

Comments on the new National Council on Economic Education standards and calls for more clarification and detail as well as additional standards. Argues that the almost-exclusive focus on principles-based standards ignores that need for explicit skill standards. Discusses possible difficulties for social studies teachers not trained in economics.…

Internalization of higher education will be remembered as one of the major challenges and accomplishments of the last two decades. This paper introduces the concept of qualitative and quantitative tracking measures to enable a monitoring of progress and quality toward specified objects or targets. The purpose of this paper is: (1) to emphasize the…

This report charts a brief history of the comprehensive high school in the United States designed particularly to highlight those key decisions that make them what they are. The first and longest part of the paper is organized chronologically into sections with the following headings: 1600-1890--Getting Started; 1890-1920--Basic Reform/Social…

In one of the author's academic homes at the University of Hawai'i, the "Globalization Research Center", educators are trying to gain a better understanding of the ways in which new technologies and ways of organizing learning across the globe have been transformed in the last five to eight years and, more importantly, they are seeking…

The development of the junior high school as a distinct and separate unit of the public-school system is one of the most remarkable and striking chapters in the history of public education in the United States. From humble beginnings in a few scattered cities the movement has gathered momentum until hundreds of school systems have been profoundly…

This paper examines secondary schools in countries other than the United States to show the diversity of secondary school systems that operate within the industrialized world. The six countries are Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, and Great Britain. The descriptions are organized according to country and area of focus--learner outcomes,…

A somatic approach to education implies education that trusts individuals to learn from and listen to the information they are receiving from the interaction of self with the environment. Somatic or embodied knowing is experiential knowledge that involves senses, perceptions, and mind-body action and reaction. Western culture has been dominated by…

Ireland's economic and social problems in the 1980s spawned a new kind of community education. Key characteristics of the new community education are as follows: (1) it is a learning environment and located in the community; (2) it provides learning programs based on identified needs; (3) its control remains in the local community's hands; (4) its…