The author did not expect to be surprised or disturbed by the data from the latest Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) salary survey; however, she was. CASE has been conducting the survey since 1982, so she assumed the findings would mirror her own salary history and those of her peers. While she suspected that older women…

What does it take to reach a middle school reader? Literacy expert Laura Robb recently shared her top strategies in a webcast for Scholastic fans. This article presents Robb's 13 strategies for thirteen-year-olds. These are: (1) Respect students' search for self; (2) Embrace blogging; (3) Send texts in class; (4) Take words apart; (5) Build…

Presidents, governors and mayors are often publicly assessed on what they accomplish in their first 100 days in office. This is a traditional measuring stick for public officials. Starting off on the right foot also is viewed as a factor in how superintendents are remembered or whether there will be sufficient reasons for being remembered at all.…

Mandated mentoring is a concept associated with both possibilities and pitfalls, because it requires staff development for and by public school teachers. While such mentoring seemingly reflects a higher commitment to new teachers, it also introduces restrictive elements and oppressive expectations for assigned mentors and mentees. Importantly,…

The report extends a previous analysis of universal instructional design principles in distance education by applying them to the design of mobile learning. Eight principles with particular relevance for distance education are selected, and their recommendations are discussed in relation to the design of educational materials for a range of mobile…

In 2004, Donald Berwick, a doctor and the CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, had some ideas about how to save lives--massive numbers of lives. The institute he led had analyzed patient care applying the analytical tools used to assess the quality of cars coming off a production line. Berwick and colleagues discovered the "defect"…

For most of the last two centuries, Native Greenlandic teachers had been left out of the decision-making process regarding effective education for Greenlandic students. Rather, Danish education and church officials, living in Denmark, made important pedagogical and curricular decisions with little to no input from local teachers (Jakobsen, 1999).…

Recently national policymakers have placed new emphasis on school turnarounds as a strategy for rapid, dramatic improvement in chronically failing schools, calling on education leaders to turn around performance in the 5,000 lowest-achieving schools nationwide. This goal may seem daunting, given the low success rates of school improvement efforts…

Prospective teachers pursue a graduate degree in TESOL with the expectation that they will become more qualified, on paper and in practice, and more recognized as professionals in the field. In this article, the authors interrogate that assumption by exploring what it means to be a TESOL professional and how graduate students begin to shape this…

My point of departure in this essay is that student approaches to assessment appear to have become more instrumental, and that there has been a correlative propensity in my teaching practice to "teach to the test". Hence, both learners and teachers seem to have become more strategic in relation to assessment. This situation, I argue, is…

This ex-post facto designed study investigated the extent of Deans and Heads of Departments' effectiveness in managing research output for knowledge creation in South-South Nigerian universities. One research question and one hypothesis were drawn along the four dimensions of knowledge creation namely: socialization, combination, externalization…

This article describes the mechanism through which cultural variability is a source of learning differences. The authors argue that the Universal Design for Learning can be extended to capture the way learning is influenced by cultural variability, and show how the UDL framework might be used to create a curriculum that is responsive to this…

A national survey of school districts last fall by the Center on Education Policy found that fewer than half of the districts had planned professional development aligned to the Common Core State Standards this school year. The challenge of getting the nation's 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers ready to teach to the standards is enormous.…

This paper is a systematic review of scholarly studies that examines how organizations enhance their ability to generate value through social media. It explores why some organizations are able to adopt and benefit from social media while others cannot. Specifically, it examines: (i) how "people" and social networks are essential to…

This brief by the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse is about reaching for the stars--stories of vision and commitment from educators in small and large schools. Everyone knows of people who are held up as "visionaries" throughout history: Leonardo Da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, Jules Verne, Thomas Edison, Susan Anthony, or John Dewey, to name a few. The…