One of the suggestions for improving the professional development of school leaders is to adopt some of the practices used in other professional fields. This paper explores three models of professional development traditionally followed in medicine, law, and the Catholic priesthood to assess the extent to which these approaches are likely to…

Minorities constitute 26 percent of the U.S. population, but only 12 percent of higher education's full-time instructional faculty. Adequate representation of minority faculty in higher education is crucial, as they serve as mentors, communicate the possibility of success for minority students, and help develop a knowledge base on minority issues.…

Studies indicate that, although enrollment and degree production by women doctoral students have increased, fewer women than men complete doctorates and women generally take longer than men to finish, in spite of the fact that women demonstrate equal if not superior performance levels on virtually every objective measure. Women who complete the…

This document consists of a series of three short articles that appeared in the "Resource Connections" column of three consecutive issues of the newsletter of the Boston chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The articles are intended for adults considering enrolling in a professional development program,…

Distance education strategies offer the potential to overcome barriers of time and distance. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries have been providing an array of services to distant learners enrolled in UNL graduate degree programs. This paper reviews the services that the UNL Libraries have developed, describes current objectives, and…

The concept of the learning community and the transition of both students and teachers to the teaching/learning relationship has become a focus of graduate programs at Heritage College (Toppenish, Washington). The mission of Heritage is to provide quality, accessible higher education to a multicultural population which has been educationally…

This study examined the concerns and confidence of 10 educators (9 elementary and secondary school teachers and 1 school principal) as they adopted naturalistic assessment procedures. Participants enrolled in a 4-month graduate course and implemented various literacy assessment procedures in their classrooms. Data were collected through the Stages…

In response to current trends in higher education, the Communication Department at George Mason University in Virginia has developed some innovations which include: (1) a teaching doctorate targeted at community college teachers, including internships in a government agency, a professional association, or business and a dissertation as an applied…

This book offers first-hand, personal dialogues about the experience of completing a doctoral dissertation. The group of 10 students at Warwick University (United Kingdom) who contributed their impressions had been together for 3 years; 3 had already completed their doctorates while the others' projects were still incomplete. The book is organized…

This paper shares the development and evolution of a pragmatic-experiential model of teacher education at the University of West Alabama. The model is grounded in the theories and philosophies promoted by Dewey and James. The philosophy of pragmatism encourages testing the authenticity or truth of ideas through experience. Experientialism, an…

An English 812 class in expository writing at Georgia State University was restructured by the instructor to become a seminar in academic publishing. Often, lengthy assignments are assigned in graduate seminar courses, with professors incorrectly assuming that graduate students already have knowledge of the writing process, when they often do not.…

Existing research reveals little about the availability of internships for graduate students in higher education, and also fails to explain the utilization of these internship offerings. The findings from this study suggest that while a majority of programs in higher education have some type of practice-based offerings in their curricula,…

This paper describes a school-oriented teacher education program at the Institute of Education, University of Utrecht (Netherlands). The program prepares teachers for the upper level of secondary education in a one-year post-graduate course that follows a four-year subject matter masters program. Because half of the one-year course is…

This study investigated the communication preferences of graduate students in the teacher education program in Deaf Education at Gallaudet University (District of Columbia). Thirty-seven (of 76) full-time students in the Master's program completed a questionnaire. Forty percent of the students were deaf or hard of hearing and 49 percent were…

This article reviews the development of interactive business letters as a form of peer review of writing, presents the activities's general operation, and discusses its benefits by presenting examples of actual student peer reviews from the International Trade Institute graduate school in Taiwan. Rather than have students read and critique each…