An urban middle school goes through the transformation of becoming a university-supported lab school. Drawing upon design thinking principles, the planning team cultivates a sense of shared empathy, creative problem-solving, and an ethos of curiosity and learning in a collaborative environment.

This case study, framed within a school-university partnership, highlights the tensions inherent to employing design-based approaches for educational change. The case illustrates core tensions between an abductive, open-ended, design-based approach to change versus more traditional (deductive/inductive) approaches to managing change in schools.…

This article examines how one elementary school was divided into two schools--a primary and an intermediate school--because of how policies were interpreted and enacted with regard to high-stakes testing. The grades in which students took high-stakes tests were privileged in terms of receiving monetary resources and support from staff. An emphasis…

Based on work with state and local education agencies in dropout prevention for students with disabilities, successful research-based interventions are described along with details of how these interventions have been implemented in middle and high schools across the country. The interventions that have helped students with disabilities graduate…

This article explores student empowerment in a restructured urban Title I middle school. The study includes data from eight participants in an action research project that involved a critical inquiry unit in an eighth-grade language arts class that asked students, "How are you empowered and disempowered by school?" Findings reveal that…

"Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education" provides a much-needed blueprint for how school leaders can leverage the power of collaborative learning to create more culturally and linguistically responsive schools. The book describes an innovative network of twenty preK-8 schools located across the United States striving to…

This performance assessment pilot study was a major research component of the overall National Science Foundation funded Redesigned High Schools for Transformed STEM Learning Project. Secondary Earth/Environmental Science students' abilities to translate cognitive knowledge into demonstrable performance-based proficiencies were specifically…

Project-Based Learning (PBL) serves as an instructional approach to classroom teaching and learning that is designed to engage students in the investigation of real-world problems to create meaningful and relevant educational experiences. The causal-comparative study compared 7th and 8th students who had utilized the PBL with a comparison group in…

The purpose of this case study was to examine the transition from junior high school to a middle school as experienced in two middle schools from a mid-sized urban school district located in the Rocky Mountains. The overarching question that guided data collection for this study centered on the factors that influenced school culture before,…

School closures are increasingly common among U.S. public schools, driven by both budgetary constraints and accountability pressures to turnaround low-performing schools. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on school closures by evaluating student achievement and mobility outcomes in a large-scale restructuring effort in Washington,…

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to follow 1 principal's journey to assist the district in its reconfiguration goals, and help the school change through deep examination of district personnel's and parents' perceptions of the change process. This was done by acknowledging distinctions and differences between junior…

For five years the authors have facilitated professional development leading to restructuring and reform at Ravine Junior High (RJH). As they present their work with colleagues from RJH, people ask them how did they get teacher buy-in. They answered that they don't get teachers to buy-in, they get teachers to drive the process. At RJH, they…

A substantial body of research indicates that positive school culture benchmarks are integrally tied to the success of school reform and change in general. Additionally, an emerging body of research suggests a similar role for school culture in effective implementation of school violence prevention and intervention efforts. However, little…

This paper identifies the ways in which the Productive Pedagogies framework has been refined as a research tool for evaluating classroom practice within a current study into issues of school reform in Queensland. Initially emerging from the landmark Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (1998-2001), the Productive Pedagogies has been taken…

Success for All (SFA)[R] is a whole-school reform model that includes a reading, writing, and oral language development program for students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. Classroom reading instruction is delivered in daily 90-minute blocks to students grouped by reading ability. Immediate intervention with tutors who are certified…