Conventional wisdom says that the way to win more awards is to get researchers writing more proposals. Yet many incentives designed to stimulate proposal development can be hard on the bottom line, especially those that pay researchers for their time or to attend grant-writing workshops presented by outside consulting firms. This paper presents…

Advances in technology are transforming how youth and parents interact with programs. The Strengthening 4-H Communication through Technology project was implemented in eight county 4-H programs in Northwest Minnesota. This article outlines the intentional process used to effectively implement technology in program planning. The project includes:…

This article narrates the experience of rhetoric and composition faculty developing a graduate program at a growing state university in south Texas. The narrative emphasizes the contextual constraints that required "institutional critique" and rhetorical negotiations. The second part of the article argues for a critical stance on how we…

At technical colleges and secondary-level tech schools, students enrolled in basic electronics labs who have learned about diodes that do rectification are used to seeing power diodes like the 1N4001. When the students are introduced to low-power zener diodes and signal diodes, component identification gets more complex. If the small zeners are…

In Mr. Wood's technology class, students learned about many aspects of engineering, including design of a product, teamwork, testing hypotheses, and testing the final product. In this article, the author describes how his class, particularly his team, applied everything they learned about the process to their kayak design challenge using the IDEAL…

This article describes a project in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to develop an in-house career coaching program to support and develop young employees recruited on an affirmative action initiative. The project involved the international partnership of a financial services organization in the UAE and a training provider in Canada to train human…

Major advances in the number, capabilities, and quality of state, national, and transnational databases have opened up new opportunities for evaluators. Both large-scale data sets collected for administrative purposes and those collected by other researchers can provide data for a variety of evaluation-related activities. These include (a)…

We describe a targeted professional development (PD) intervention designed to improve the quality of individualized family service plans (IFSPs) and to support IFSP planning, development, and decision making. The theoretical and empirical foundations for the PD intervention and its key components are reviewed. Building on an established online…

The purpose of this article is to discuss feminist-program-planning issues, drawing from a critical ethnographic study of a Latin American feminist community-based organization. The research findings discuss the centrality of feminist identity to understanding and analyzing day-to-day program-planning process issues within a feminist…

In an education environment focused on high-stakes testing in reading and math, service learning may seem like an unnecessary frill. But well-planned service learning projects can enhance student engagement in school and give students opportunities to use academic skills and knowledge to make a difference in their communities. This article gives…

Student feedback collected through program evaluation of secondary education licensure and Master's program clinical experiences prompted us to conduct a collective self-study. We used a reflective framework for analysis and discussion of the shifts students in our courses made as they progressed from observers to practicing teachers. Along with…

While literacy interventions can be implemented in any grade, focusing on interventions in grades 3-8 is critical because it is often the best chance for students identified with earlier reading deficiencies to become ready for the literacy demands of postsecondary education and careers. States in both the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL)…

In an era of accountability, teachers must be prepared to adapt to the variability they encounter in today's classrooms. Instead of knowing only routine responses to the challenges of practice, teachers need a repertoire that is characterized by adaptive expertise. Preservice preparation can foster teacher candidates' adaptive expertise through…

This study examines how high-quality professional development can promote the diffusion of effective teaching strategies among teachers through collaboration. Drawing on longitudinal and sociometric data from a study of writing professional development in 39 schools, this study shows that teachers' participation in professional development is…

This article reports the development and results of a project within the Comenius program to promote teachers' occupational well-being, in which Finnish, Irish, Italian, and German school communities participated between 2003 and 2006. The project made use of participatory action research, in which the occupational well-being of staff was…