Staff development is a school district activity that is generating more activity and becoming more expensive. As the amount of dollars spent increases, so will the demands for accountability and results. Traditional methods for determining staff development programs are inadequate or incomplete. A more effective method is to relate the staff…

In five meetings between June 1988 and September 1989, the national curriculum committee of the Holmes Group, a consortium of 96 U.S. research universities committed to making their teacher education programs more rigorous and connected, came to agreement about fundamental principles that should underlie the curriculum of teacher education. In…

This paper examines an intervention to change prospective elementary teachers' knowledge and beliefs about mathematics education. The intervention consisted of a sequence of mathematics courses, a methods course, and a curriculum seminar in which establishing a community of learners was a central feature. The concept of community embodies the…

This report describes Kentucky's Primary School Program, which was developed after the signing of the Kentucky Education Reform Act in 1990. An overview of the report explains the philosophy of the program and lists its critical attributes. These are: (1) developmentally appropriate practices; (2) multi-age classrooms; (3) continuous progress; (4)…

The socially constructed beliefs that teachers hold about knowing, teaching, learning, and praxis are likely to have a profound influence on their practice. Too often teachers serve to reproduce traditional authoritarian and didactic patterns of instruction in schools, apparently because they themselves have never been given the opportunity to…

This document presents the vision of the West Virginia educational community in providing special education services to gifted and disabled students through the restructuring of schools. The approach was developed during a May 1991 meeting of special education leaders at which participants examined the major education reforms being discussed at…

Certain guiding principles emerged from a century of research on teaching and learning. Many of those principles arise from research and practice in various areas of psychology. Learner-centered psychological principles and a systems perspective for incorporating them are necessary components of a new design for schooling. Among metacognitive and…

The Danish education system undergoes constant alterations due to the changes in the Danish society but maintains characteristic features through each educational reform. Section 1 provides a main outline of the education system for primary and lower secondary education, general upper secondary education, vocational education, and higher…

Military personnel facing forced retirement are prime candidates for retraining as teachers. As mature adult learners, retiring/retired military personnel have certain needs that must be addressed if they are to become successful in their educational careers. Knowles' six assumptions of andragogy acknowledge these special needs as follows: adults…

The professional development school is an effort to invent an institutional coalition that will bring together universities, schools of education, and public schools. This report urges the creation of a relatively small number of schools as professional development schools (PDS), designed to be the focus of professional preparation, school…

Current understandings of children's development suggest that a pedagogy is appropriate for young children if: (1) it is largely informal in structure; (2) attends to children's dispositional and emotional development and development of knowledge and skills; (3) is mainly intellectual rather than academic in focus; (4) balances individual and…

This paper presents an overview of educational policymaking in several developing countries in Africa by (1) examining the nature of various educational policies in these countries; (2) drawing comparative generalizations from the outcomes of the objectives of these policies; and (3) recommending ways to avoid the failure of educational reforms.…

Four papers generated by a broader study of issues management in three suburban Chicago school districts are collected here. "Achieving Routine" focuses on the effective routinization of organizational change, in this case a curriculum decision, through the use of administrative mechanisms and the conceptual linkage of the new to…

Because social studies lacks the cognitive elegance of mathematics, the facilities and resources accorded to science, and the cadres of experts attending the language arts, it does not receive the recognition it deserves. The wide variety of academic disciplines included in the realm of social studies makes it very difficult for today's proponents…

This study examines the organizational structures of schools and school systems using six complementary but distinct perspectives--societal, intentional, structural, analytical, portrait, and narrative--in order to ascertain the appropriateness of structural revision in relation to changes in Canadian society. Following an examination of the…