Mentoring and induction programs have moved to the forefront as a strategy for helping novice teachers adjust to the challenges of teaching and develop as effective educators. Induction and mentoring efforts may begin with helping new teachers become acclimated to the classroom and cope with immediate problems, but programs must also assist the…

Educators know that standardized tests are a fact of life. They can produce useful information, but the results often are too late, too shallow or not what they needed to find out. Research shows that administering more and more of these types of tests does nothing to raise student achievement. Instead, if educators want to see real gains in…

It is well established that teacher quality makes a difference in student learning. Since the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002, staffing every classroom with a high-quality teacher has been an official national priority. That goal entails an implicit requirement to assess teacher and teaching quality more rigorously than has been the…

Focusing on just three things--evidence of student learning, feedback on teacher and principal decisions, and depth of implementation--renowned author and thinker Douglas B. Reeves provides you with a blueprint for how to ensure professional development improves student learning. Find out: (1) Which ineffective professional development practices…

Although Response to Intervention (RTI) is a necessity for all schools, the truth is that supplemental instruction can never compensate for inadequate core instruction. That's why you need this book's improved approach to RTI. Authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey introduce you to a strengthened model of RTI that emphasizes formative assessment…

Students working on a highly collaborative project used social networking technology for community building activities as well as basic project-related communication. Requiring students to work on cross-program projects gives them real-world experience working in diverse, geographically dispersed groups. An application used at Appalachian State…

Teacher educators require reflective assignments to develop the educational thinking of prospective and experience teachers. Reflective rubrics describe the quality of thinking and provide insight into teacher development. Larrivee (2008) developed a rubric compiled using input from teacher educators. Pre-service teachers' reflections with…

Everyone wants to use programs that have been proven effective. But when programs are used by large numbers of schools, the effects are often inconsistent. A three-year study by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania examined how programs are adapted by schools. The researchers found that the…

This article describes the use of "business-driven" action learning in a healthcare setting. It reviews and reflects on an example where action learning does not "take", identifying the likely causes of this. It also poses four questions--whether action learning is counter-cultural in some organisations; whether the…

The Junior Forester Academy (JFA) is a summer forestry camp that provides environmental education (EE) in the context of an outdoor education program. The JFA was established in 2004 and is located at Northern Arizona University's Centennial Forest site. The JFA's goal is to increase a campers' understanding of forest ecology and forestry skills…

Giving students detailed feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of their work, with suggestions for improvement, is becoming common practice in higher education. However, for many students, feedback seems to have little or no impact, despite the considerable time and effort put into its production. With a view to increasing its effectiveness,…

This paper presents a small-scale exploratory study, which focuses on the impact of formative assessment that was provided as part of a writing intervention in a first-year undergraduate programme. Qualitative data were collected to find evidence of use of formative feedback, and of resulting improvements, as well as to shed some light on…

The effectiveness of teaching is expected by an increasingly skeptical public that wants those in higher education to contain costs, increase access, and teach in ways that make sure students learn. An integral and under-used component of documenting teaching effectiveness is peer review. A framework for best practice to ensure a systematic and…

Starting in 2004, a medical school gross anatomy course faced with a 30% cut in hours went through an extensive redesign, which transformed a traditional dissection course into a course with a clinical focus, learning societies, and extensive on-line learning support. Built into the redesign process was an extensive and ongoing assessment process,…

In 2007, New York University's Bobst Library assembled a group of staff charged with suggesting improvements to circulation policy. As a result of these efforts many changes were implemented at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year, including extended loan periods and the elimination of routine daily overdue fines. The changes were…