The purpose of the study was to describe teachers' perceptions and experiences in implementing whole language activities in their kindergarten and elementary classrooms. Ten teachers who were part of a pilot whole language program participated in the study. Throughout the 1989-1990 school term, data were collected through teacher questionnaires…

Although supervision has become an innovative area in which ideas can easily be introduced to teachers, conservative attitudes in Turkey's ministry of education prevent implementation of changes desired by teachers, supervisors, and educational directors. Because the Turkish education system is centralized, government makes major policy and…

Students who are motivated to write and learn generally pay attention to written comments on their rough and final drafts; students who are not motivated generally ignore written comments and do not use them in revision, but nonetheless are concerned about grades. One effective way of increasing student interest in writing and skill development is…

To gauge students' reactions to a teacher's written comments on final drafts of their papers, a questionnaire was administered to 197 students in six sections of freshman composition. Most of the students responding to the questionnaire were majoring in engineering, computer science, or business. Their six instructors had similar criteria for…

This paper highlights the findings of Gougeon's 1989 study of high school principals of schools with grade configurations 9 through 12 in the state of Washington, a study based on the Principal Leadership as Social Control (PLASC) theory. Accordingly, the first section describes the PLASC theory as social control of teachers through power- and…

Following a review of empirical research on teacher feedback to students' wrong responses, this paper describes a paradigm for use with direct instruction materials, applying the feedback model to comprehension tasks from traditional reading and science textbooks. The next section details a classification system for wrong responses grouped into…

Several studies have indicated that children frequently and actively attempt to manipulate adult behavior. Yet children have not been routinely used as behavioral change agents in the classroom. To study the extent to which teachers' evaluations of students' behavior and academic progress could be changed, 67 male high school students participated…

The single most important thing that a teacher can do for a student is to identify and label specifically what the child does right rather than what he or she does wrong. In an elementary school where students wrote every day and teachers marked every error, students began to write less, using simpler words and eliminating all meaningful writing.…

Reflections are offered on the challenge of teaching a foreign language to academically gifted adolescents. At the introductory levels, able students are impatient with materials that are too simplistic. To hold their attention, they need exercises that involve choice, complex structural changes, and creativity. Colloquial dialogues and culturally…

The materials described in this manual are based on a series of anecdotes of conflict situations in secondary classrooms. The situations focus on emotional and behavioral problems of adolescents. This trainer's manual is intended to be used with a videotape cassette that depicts fifteen vignettes of classroom events in which student behavior…

A course for students of secondary education was designed to help them develop insights into human interaction and to develop and practice communication skills. It was hoped that these students would develop and practice communication skills in their daily lives, so that their chances of using them in the classroom would be improved. The class was…

The problem of change in Canadian teacher education was studied, and the effectiveness of survey feedback, an organization development intervention, was tested in twelve Canadian teacher education institutions. Based on a review of the literature on change and teacher education, the argument is made that the impetus for change occurs as a result…

The authors argue that personnel who select standardized achievement tests have been led to believe that the major achievement test batteries differ very little in terms of the topics they test; but that the content covered by these major tests is different, and that such differences have consequences for instructional content. To test this…

The purpose of this paper is to report progress on the development of an observation instrument useful in characterizing the communication between teacher and student during oral reading instruction. The paper is divided into five major sections: (1) an overview of oral reading instruction at primary levels, (2) a theoretical perspective for…

This study, part of an ongoing effort to determine the future structure of secondary education in Northern Ireland, surveys teacher attitudes on the organization of secondary education. Questionnaires were sent to a sample of primary, secondary, and higher education teachers. Teacher opinion was divided most strongly with regard to the present…