The six essays published in this issue all seek to extend principles of communication and instruction. They share an instrumental view of communication as a way to address problems and deficiencies and simultaneously position instructional communication research squarely within larger organizational and professional communication contexts. In…

A recent controversy over Amazon's culture has strong implications for the whole child approach, and it offers powerful lessons for principals. A significant difference between the culture of so many businesses today and the culture at good schools is that in good schools, the welfare of the employees is very important. Student success is the…

Mental health professionals who both provide services and effectively make use of them to address their own emotional or psychiatric challenges are called wounded healers. Despite the potential benefits of lived experience, these professionals often must contend with institutions and systems that are discriminatory. The authors use life-writing to…

The members of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) strongly advocate that all professionals must come prepared and continue to develop through ongoing professional learning opportunities the skills necessary to promote the meaningful and appropriate participation of children and youth with exceptionalities in schools and community-based…

The author of this article reflects on the question of how academics can increase the joyful and holistic nature of their work, in other words, how to shift from disenchantment to enchantment in the academy. The author argues that this shift is cultivated daily, not only in the "action" and "doing" portion of their work but in…

This report compares average rates of frequent teacher absence (more than 10 days) for teachers with and without union or union-like contracts in traditional public schools and charter schools. The study's rationale is that such absences substantively harm students and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. It finds that teachers contractually…

The policy reforms over the past 15 years have placed all the responsibility for reading achievement on teachers, with little, if any, support. What many have achieved is declining achievement in comparison with other countries. Moreover, there are increasing teacher shortages, as promising individuals choose other careers and teachers leave the…

Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? While Hanlon confronted presidential challenges at the very outset of his tenure,…

Richard DuFour, a leading advocate for creating professional learning communities in schools, shares his insights on why teaching has become an "embattled profession" and the steps teachers and school leaders can take to enhance teachers' practice and their working lives. DuFour explains how recent reforms aimed at educators themselves…

The purpose of this statement is to help beginning faculty members, particularly at the assistant professor rank and in non-tenure-track positions, to succeed in their new institutions. These recommendations are intended for early-career faculty members themselves as well as administrators and other faculty in the hiring departments, to ensure…

To build postsecondary institutions that educate responsible citizens as well as competent employees and consumers, it is important that people must teach and learn themselves about the context--domestic and global--in which work is to be done, and the purposes which economic and technological development serve. One aspect of that context is the…

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) members are likely to be familiar with the 1960 adaptation of Howard Fast's "Spartacus" by Stanley Kubrick and Dalton Trumbo, a rousing Kirk Douglas production widely credited with breaking the Hollywood blacklist. They are a bit less likely to be among the five or six million weekly viewers of…

21st century school leadership is not for the faint of heart and as with any organization a school is only as successful as their leadership. The acknowledgment that a "different" reality exists for school principals is of utmost importance when identifying the conditions, situations, and roles that one will engage in. In this article Dr. East…

Antony John Kunnan is a language assessment specialist. His research interests are fairness of tests and testing practice, assessment literacy, research methods and statistics, ethics and standards, and language assessment policy. His most recent publications include a four-volume edited collection of 140 chapters titled "The Companion to…

In this theoretical essay, I argue that the current incidences of backlash to diversity are best understood as a dynamic of complicated, historic and intertwined desires for racial diversity and white entitlement to property. I frame this argument in the theories of critical race theory and settler colonialism, each of which provide necessary but…