Tests and exams are a source of stress for many students. High school teacher Jacob Wells has found that he can alleviate some of that stress by allowing students to weigh in on when their assessments are scheduled. He describes why this has been helpful and shares some of the parameters that have made it feasible.

Not enough attention is paid to the instructional design decisions that define students' experiences. Lisa Dover Kingsley and Jennifer Perry Cheatham contend that while quality teaching is crucial, the structural decisions supporting meaningful engagement often go unexamined. Using innovations in North Kansas City, Missouri, as a throughline, they…

A great deal of teacher planning involves an invisible process of envisioning how plans might unfold in the classroom. Novice teachers can benefit from seeing how experienced teachers work through this process, but, too often, co-planning sessions between mentors and novices focus on selecting activities to fill out a lesson, rather than delving…

Everybody complains about a lack of time in school, but few are prepared to do anything about it. Laying the foundation before making such a shift is essential to the success of the change. Once a broad-based team has been chosen to do the work, they can follow a process explained in four steps with the apt acronym of T.I.M.E.: Taking stock,…

High school students should be able to hit the ground running when school begins, but budget uncertainties lead to schedule changes that lead to disruptions for the first several weeks of classes for most students and many teachers. In this article, the author describes the chaos that often accompanies scheduling during the first weeks of the…

Modular scheduling benefits only a minority of students. A client-centered approach to individualization seems to be a promising area. (Author/RA)

The student-centered learning practices associated with constructivism could benefit from the increased class time that block scheduling offers. But, in this article, the author observes, too often block scheduling is adopted as an end in itself, not as a tool to facilitate a specific pedagogical approach. The author expands on his observation in…

Motivational factors affecting decisions to discontinue existing minicourse programs or to not consider the adoption of minicourse programs tend to be programmatic and administrative rather than philosophical. (Author/IRT)

Russia's educational system has been successful in producing graduates who excel in mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages, but these are not the only areas that we might look to as models. Russian and American cultures and educational practices differ in significant ways, and not all of the practices described here would be workable in…

Argues that educators must "think outside the box" to improve school performance. Suggests several areas for expanded thought, including school size, curriculum coverage, grading practices, use of time, organization of students, time management, and belief statement. (PKP)

To shed light on appropriate grouping practices for early adolescents, this article presents current data on using between-class grouping and regrouping in American schools serving this population, based on the 1988 Johns Hopkins University middle school survey. Findings show that learning opportunities in the middle grades remain highly…

Describes several reasons, based largely on dissatisfaction with New York City bureaucracy, why principal of International High School in Queens decided to accept invitation to become a charter school: Student selection challenges; need for school-based staffing; scheduling, financial, and purchasing rigidities; and state assessment requirements.…

Argues that instead of lengthening school days and years, schools should efficiently include rescheduling school days to include solely academic courses and instituting mastery learning. (JW)

Recent studies of turnarounds of low-performing schools have focused on the factors that made their successes possible. The author of this article realizes that it would also be valuable to look at what made the schools decline in the first place and the factors that might hinder their transformation. He focuses on some of the aspects of the…