The mental health implications of crisis exposure have emerged as a critical and challenging facet of school safety and crisis response, expanding our focus to encompass both psychological and physical safety, as well as prevention and recovery. Best practice reflects this evolution in our understanding and encompasses the continuum of crisis and…

Student psychology--how the classroom looks and feels from the perspective of the student--can powerfully affect motivation and learning, and experiments are increasingly showing that even brief interventions to change psychology can boost achievement over months or years. When paired with other structural reforms, social-psychological…

When students are hopeful, they do better in school and in life. Hopeful students have better grades and score higher on assessments. The Gallup Student Poll finds that about half of U.S. students are hopeful. Principals and other adults in a school should spread hope among students by creating excitement about the future, teaching students the…

Patriotism can be a force for good or evil. American patriotism helped vanquish fascism; German patriotism helped create and sustain it. Wars of national liberation depend on patriotic fervor to oppose colonial rule; unfortunately, ethnic cleansing draws on this same fervor. Appeals to the transcendent value of the nation-state can be progressive…

Teachers are being reassigned outside their primary specialities because of budget cuts, declining enrollments, school closures, and teacher layoffs. This article offers guidelines for developing a program, based on one implemented in Garden City (Michigan), that serves the retraining and emotional needs of reassigned teachers. (WD)

Humanistic education is a systematic, conscious attempt to put into practice the best we know about the nature of human beings and how they learn. Humanistic education maintains that what students experience about themselves and their world is far too important for education to overlook. (Author/IRT)

A survey of 160 randomly selected teachers in the primary and junior divisions of four school jurisdictions in eastern Ontario showed a significant difference between teachers defined as inner-directed and those identified as outer-directed in terms of their acceptance of ideas and principles outlined in the Ontario guidelines. (Author/WD)

To understand urban Native American students more fully, teachers must grasp the contrast between rural/reservation living and urban life (generally more hostile) for these students and their families. Teachers should determine students' home language and their degree of facility in school English. Teachers should also recognize Native American…

Summarizes an extensive survey of research on early education and questions the need for State intervention. (Author)

Studies of the effects of emotional deprivation during infancy and childhood are cited in this article about the nature and meaning of love. (MF)

The cause of school and marriage failure is that most people practice stimulus-response psychology. Choice theory helps nurture the warm, supportive human relationships that students need for school success and couples need for marital success. Satisfying four basic psychological needs (for belonging, power, freedom, and fun) helps humans create…

In response to changing social norms and "psychosocial epidemics" disrupting children's lives, schools must become more important agents of character development, providing education in civic virtue and personality adjustment. Schools'"damage control" function cannot succeed without involving families and reevaluating existing…

The Statements about Schools Inventory, designed to assess how well a school is satisfying the needs of its students, has gathered evidence that alternative schools come closer to satisfying student needs than do conventional schools. (Author/WD)

As a matter of public policy, education should move toward institutional pluralism that takes account of group needs and identities within a larger American culture. We must lay to rest the bugbear that a diverse system is necessarily a corrosively segregated and unequal system. (Author/IRT)

Phi Delta Kappa study collected data on over 21,000 students in grades 4, 7, and 10 in 275 schools in over 80 U.S. communities. Five risk factors emerged: personal pain, academic failure, family socioeconomic status, family instability, and family tragedy. Many teachers helped considerably with personal pain and academic failure problems,…