The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education are deeply committed to ensuring that every student in the state has access to a high-quality education, and they have combined this commitment with an openness to innovation. After just one year of School…

In this reflective essay, the author addresses fellow educators and their responsibility to students on issues surrounding the ongoing struggle for civil rights. She links the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools in 1957 with the 2018 student protest against gun violence following the Parkland, FL mass shooting. As a facilitator of…

The purpose of this qualitative multi-case study is to explore the ways in which preservice teachers seeking either early-childhood or elementary licensure understand their roles and responsibilities in regards to the teaching of religion. Seven participants participated in the study and provided a range of data including -- though not limited to…

Research has shown that social and emotional learning (SEL) can benefit students in affective, interpersonal, communicative, and academic realms. However, teachers integrating SEL face a variety of logistical, pedagogical, and skill development challenges, including how to effectively facilitate classroom conversations on social justice and…

Student-generated materials offer high engagement, connectedness, and satisfaction in learning. In this project, the students merged the concepts and cases learned in class with the experiences of business professionals to create scenarios that can convey the concepts of Business Ethics (BE) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to secondary…

Principals represent the most "visible" form of leadership in schools, but current workforce data show that K-12 school principals are overwhelmingly white and fail to reflect the diversity within the student population. With increased policy focus on teacher diversity, equal attention must also be directed towards the lack of diversity…

"The Practice Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development" outlines promising practices that show how students, teachers, parents, and administrators can integrate social, emotional, and academic learning in preK-12 education. The report, which represents the vision of the 34-member Council of…

Since the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) started working with state education agencies in 2003, the level of activity to advance social and emotional learning (SEL) has accelerated significantly, particularly in the past few years. State education leaders and policymakers are taking numerous steps to help…

Rhode Island educators believe that implementing a fair, accurate, and meaningful educator evaluation and support system will help improve teaching, learning, and school leadership. The primary purpose of the Rhode Island Model Building Administrator Evaluation and Support System (Rhode Island Model) is to help all building administrators improve.…

Data governance provides state agencies a structure in which to define the roles and responsibilities needed to ensure clear processes for collecting and reporting education data and to ensure accountability for data quality and security. To make informed policy decisions across agencies, such as the state education agency and early childhood,…

This brief provides an overview of state and district legal requirements related to disproportionality; addresses common pitfalls in policy, practices, and procedures; and discusses how to proactively structure policies and procedures in systems of service delivery to address disproportionality.

A Health in All Policies approach engages cross-sector stakeholders to collaboratively improve systems that drive population health. We, the members of the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP)'s Health in All Policies Action Team, propose that adopting a Health in All Policies approach within the national Cooperative Extension…

The purpose of this study is to examine the similarities between mentor teachers' espoused theories and theories-in-use. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 mentor teachers to investigate their perceived mentoring roles prior to the placement. Their seven pre-service teachers were also interviewed at the end of the practicum to…

In this study, we investigated the impact of past and current service-learning on the civic attitudes of African American college women: 44 students enrolled in either service-learning or non-service-learning courses were given pretests and posttests measuring civic attitudes. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to examine the…

The legal treatment of disability affairs carries in itself an inherent contradiction due to the nature of modern society and free-market economy. On the one hand both the historically developed notions of essentialism and on the other the particular-functional definition of manhood drawing its roots from the established democratic order and…