The current round of basic education curriculum reform in China is considered by many to be the most radical and wide-reaching. However, very little is known about education reform at the school level. Here we document and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that the reform programme is providing for teachers and schools. We describe…

In this article, the author describes how middle schools can prepare young people for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. Integrating 21st century skills deliberately and systematically into middle school education will empower educators to accomplish many of the elusive goals they have tried to reach for years. Twenty-first…

After brief histories of laboratory schools and comparable Japanese "attached schools," this article promotes preservation of university-controlled schools in a cooperating schools network that provides teacher training and experimentation sites. Although university-controlled schools may have professional development school…

This study examined the perceptions of cooperating teachers who are coaching student teachers within Professional Development School (PDS) models in two cultures. Part of an action research project conducted by the University of California-Irvine (UCI) and Beit Berl College (Israel), the study examined: (1) what contributions the cooperating…

The four papers presented here address teacher development from an international viewpoint. In "Professional Development and Standards" (Linda Darling-Hammond) it is suggested that U.S. educators engage in new kinds of collaborations with universities, and it proposes a shift from information transmittal to "co-construction" of…