Describes five school crises. In each case example, errors in crisis management by school staff exacerbated the crisis and resulted in deleterious consequences for the school, its students, and the surrounding community. Identifies common themes of leadership, teamwork, and responsibility that are critical to successful crisis management.…

In a learning community, students learn to cooperate and make teams work. Past technologies (print, photography, film, and computers) have enabled idea sharing, but are one-way communication modes. Broader learning communities have been made possible through electronic field trips, online mentoring, science investigations, and humanities…

Directed to improve administrative leadership effectiveness, the Philadelphia School District's new regional superintendent determined that participant research and practitioner inquiry would encourage principals, teachers, and support staff to become a community engaged in thinking, learning, and working together to educate urban learners. Staff…

This article describes an action research project that tracked the progress of under achieving fourth-grade students throughout the school year. The project used a collaborative problem solving and planning guide in an inclusive classroom to enhance students' productive work and produce gains in student achievement and student social skills.…

Interviews with, and classroom observations of, 17 teachers in Queensland (Australia) and Pennsylvania examined co-teaching approaches to provide support to students with disabilities in inclusive secondary classrooms. Co-teaching partnerships in both countries were dominated by content subject teachers with special educators in…

A survey of 984 mothers in Bavaria of young children with disabilities investigated their views regarding cooperation and what they expect to achieve from parent-expert partnerships. Results indicate dialoguing with professionals and model learning during intervention is the most helpful way for parents to learn how to cope with their child.…

A team of university and school personnel applied layers of interventions across 2 years to 34 students who fell below their class averages in reading skills in kindergarten and first grade. Although reading failure rates declined, the interventions did not significantly decrease the proportion of children identified for special education.…

Overviews challenges that rural educators face in meeting the diverse needs of students. A case study illustrates key elements of creating a positive behavior support plan: establishing a collaborative problem-solving team, determining the student's strengths, identifying the purpose of the negative behavior, identifying prevention strategies,…

This article tells the story of one elementary school faculty who responded to the call for accountability by adopting an inclusive view and implementing educational practices where all students were welcomed and considered valuable, contributing members of the school community. The inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education…

Although it has been argued that students with behavioral disorders benefit most from placement in general education classrooms, careful and systematic support is required to insure that their placement is successful. In this article, we review supports and interventions provided at multiple levels that together are known as "positive behavior…

This paper is a case study on the use of active learning techniques in an upper-level engineering course at the Helsinki University of Technology. The paper describes how these techniques were introduced and successfully used within the Finnish university classroom. The cultural subtext is explored and attention is given to teaching techniques…

The purpose of this article is to advocate for proactive content in discipline codes of conduct. Proactive discipline codes integrate Positive Behavior Support (PBS) strategies (Sugai & Horner, 2002) and attend to the academic needs of students (McEvoy & Welker, 2000). Proactive discipline codes of conduct have meaningful participation by key…

Historically, the policy of deinstitutionalization has resulted in the closing of many federal and state mental health facilities. This has caused many criminal justice professionals and social workers to question where the mentally ill are placed when they are no longer in a treatment facility. With the abundance of offenders with mental health…

To help students develop successful strategies for learning how to learn and communicate complex information in cell biology, we developed a quarter-long cell biology class based on team projects. Each team researches a particular human disease and presents information about the cellular structure or process affected by the disease, the cellular…

This study investigated how well chemical engineering graduates perceive they were prepared for work in industry. To this end, sixteen interviews were carried out with a purposive sample of recent University of Cape Town chemical engineering graduates. Qualitative analysis of the interview data showed that graduates felt that overall, they were…