A growing number of school districts--including large ones like those in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Hawaii--have become recent converts to new principal-evaluation systems that tie school leaders' appraisals to student test scores. As of this school year, student achievement accounts for 40 percent to 50 percent of principals' evaluations…

This article is an investigation of two apparently contradictory impulses in Oakeshott's writings about liberal education. On the one hand, he implied that it was primarily "aesthetic", something undertaken for its own sake with no practical consequences. On the other hand, he often implied that a student might undergo a moral transformation in…

In 1990 Helon Howell Raines published "Is There a Writing Program in This College? Two Hundred and Thirty-Six Two-Year Schools Respond," in which she reported on her study, via survey and eight follow-up telephone interviews, of two-year college writing programs across the country. Raines asked questions about departmental and institutional…

Across the United States, a wide cross-section of administrators and teachers are learning the ins and outs of setting, assessing, and scoring student learning objectives (SLOs). An SLO is a set of goals that measures an educator's progress in achieving student growth targets. SLOs are particularly helpful for teachers in nontested subjects and…

A key factor in mentoring effectiveness and satisfaction is ensuring that mentor preparation training and ongoing support address needed mentor knowledge and abilities (MKAs). Knowing how to mentor is different from knowing what mentoring involves or knowing mentoring policies and procedures. Ideally, mentor training incorporates both the…

Whereas teachers' responsibilities with accountability, class sizes and workload increase, their benefits, income and job security seem to decrease. Motivating and keeping classroom teachers motivated to successfully and happily perform their instructional duties can be challenging. One feasible approach to motivating teachers is offering…

This paper is the first in a series of working papers on change. The creation of a public education system that aspires to educate all of this nation's children is a great achievement. Yet today this bedrock American institution is at risk. The system continually falls short of its aspiration, and the achievement gap, the drop-out rate, chronic…

Collaboration is inherently part of many dance pedagogies, dance practices, and dance careers, which is why dance students are frequently required to work and learn together in the dance studio and classroom. Outside of dance, in a variety of disciplines, the ability to collaborate is prized as a highly valuable competency, and the facility to…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…

Professional development school (PDS) partnerships have existed in one local school system (LSS) with three different institutions of higher education (IHE) for over a decade. Commonalities and distinctive features were noted between the partnerships. In an attempt to establish standardized and equitable policies from the LSS level,…

There are selected psychologists who have contributed much toward studying problems in teaching and learning. They have suggested plans from research, carefully conducted, which enable educational practices to be set on more secure and justifiable grounds. The writer will briefly write about ten leaders, although there are salient others.

Background: Ghana being a member of the United Nations, committed to the Universal Primary Education initiative in 2000 and has since implemented series of educational reforms to meet the target for the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 2. Despite the numerous government interventions to achieve the MDG 2, many children in Ghana have been denied…

The article deals with the issue of educational preconditions of gender education formation and development in Canadian secondary schools. On the basis of conducted scientific and pedagogical literature analysis it has been determined that gender education has undergone three main stages and is currently developing during its fourth, modern…

Experimental courses offer a good opportunity to work with competences, promoting the incorporation of strategies oriented towards motivating students to actively involve in the learning process, promoting reflexive learning and developing generic skills. This study presents different ways of developing and evaluating some important general…

The aim of this research was to study the effect of learning environment and type of goals on: (a) preschool children's performance during a play, (b) preschool children's perception of their performance and (c) preschool children's satisfaction. Fifty-six preschool children (24 boys and 32 girls; M[subscript age]?=?5.5 years) took…