The goals of the QUILT program are to increase and sustain teacher use of classroom questioning techniques and procedures that produce higher levels of student learning and thinking, and to increase the incidence of student responses at higher levels of cognition. Educational research has established relationships between discrete questioning…

This evaluation report covers the first year of the Pattonville School District-Webster University (Missouri) Professional Development Schools (PDSs) Partnership. Representatives of both organizations met regularly to explore the meaning of a school-university partnership as well as the potential benefits and commitments that would result. The…

This report is intended to assist teachers, administrators, parents, and community leaders in achieving excellence in California's public elementary education. The report is also designed to help teachers and administrators engage elementary school students in a thinking curriculum that immerses students in a rich learning environment that…

This handbook documents efforts to promote the professional development school (PDS) concept at Western Michigan University (WMU) and examines how a university might initiate the restructuring process for teacher education and collabaorate with a local school district through the establishment of a PDS. It discusses the underlying principles of…

This volume contains 17 articles on the emergence and potential of "Quality Improvement" (QI) efforts in higher education. Quality Improvement is defined as continuous improvement of processes in a cycle of plan (administration of instructional processes), do/check (assess), act (on the assessment and then continue to), plan-do-check-act. The…

In 1990, a county school district in the metropolitan Atlanta area collaborated with West Georgia College's School of Education to equip experienced teachers with the skills necessary to nurture new teachers to become more reflective and to share in cooperative learning. A study was conducted to examine teachers' perceptions of the program and of…

The aim of this collection is to present "state of the art" papers in language curriculum studies by writers who have been actively involved in shaping theory in the field and who, between them, have applied that theory in almost every part of the world and in a variety of contexts. Papers include the following: "A Decision-Making Framework for…

This report describes the development of the Brooklyn (New York) College Learning Center (BCLC), which provides direct academic support services to students, staff development services, and new technologies for instruction and support services. The report used information available from institutional databases and information from research efforts…

In spite of the many teacher evaluation models available and the extensive research on performance appraisal, few community colleges have effectively come to terms with this difficult task. Many administrators prefer to avoid the interpersonal conflict and the possible legal ramifications of performance appraisal. However, in times of limited…

This monograph describes a peer coaching project in Saskatchewan (Canada) implemented in two consecutive terms of a 16-week extended practicum. The purpose was twofold: (1) to experiment with having intern pairs engage in the supervision cycle in conjunction with the supervision provided by the cooperating teacher; and (2) to monitor the…

This paper describes a mentor teacher program for beginning instructors established at The Language Center of the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). The paper begins by noting several challenges experienced by beginning teachers that need to be recognized by mentors, after which the objectives, procedures, and guidelines of the project are…

An inservice program to teach instructional strategies that promote metacognitive development to classroom teachers in their roles as instructional designers, based on the notion that instruction in metacognitive strategies must be incorporated into content instruction, is described. Teachers were informed about the following specific…

Research suggests that successful staff development must attend to teachers' affective and humanistic needs. This paper presents strategies for staff development that are based in an affective and humanistic context. The following principles of adult learning are particularly relevant to teacher-staff development: Adults perceive themselves as…

This study describes the emerging themes and issues that impact on learning to teach science. The study examined whether the "language of schooling" that novices have been exposed to conflicts with the actual demands of practice, and how this conflict is resolved. Study participants were 14 Australian science graduates who had completed…

This paper reports on a study of the perceptions of 10 teachers as they sought to gain acceptance for curriculum practices considered to be child-responsive. The teachers worked with 5- and 6-year-old children in schools where some perceived their child-responsive practices as innovative, introducing practices which differed from those already…