The "College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards" (NCSS, 2013) places inquiry at the center of good social studies teaching and learning. Instead of social studies courses that emphasize rote memorization through the use of textbooks and lecture-based instruction, the C3 Framework asks teachers to…

Northern Kentucky University (NKU) is a comprehensive public university located just five miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio. At NKU, educators aspire to provide a personal educational experience to the more than 12,000 undergraduate students who enroll each year. Given the demographics of the undergraduate student body--more than 50% are…

Students in Mrs. Wilson's fourth-grade classroom watch in anticipation as the guest teacher, Ms. Davis, demonstrates binary signaling using a lightbulb that flashes when she holds it in her hands. She challenges them to guess what she is trying to "say" while making the lightbulb flash on and off, explaining that the lightbulb stands for…

Honors colleges and programs often evolve in response to a mandate from boards of regents or trustees. Such mandates can lead to new or accelerated change within the institution, change that in many cases is linked to and represented by honors. Such has been the case at Western Kentucky University (WKU), where the honors program has played a key…

The train-the-trainer model has great potential for expanding information literacy programs without placing undue burden on already overextended librarians; it is surprisingly underused in academic libraries. At the University of Kentucky, we employed this model to create a new information literacy program in an introductory biology lab. We…

National shortages of qualified personnel in the field of early childhood special education are well documented, with shortages magnified in regions characterized by poverty and rural geography. This article provides an overview of the challenges faced and innovations implemented by an alternate-track, personnel preparation program in Appalachian…

The following profiles address how the state departments of education are helping educators prepare for and implement the Common Core and aligned assessments through professional learning. The major professional development efforts around the Common Core were examined in order to understand the overall efforts of each state. An exhaustive list of…

Career and technical education (CTE) is forced to be reactive. A good example is the fact that CTE cannot prepare students for jobs that do not exist. Outside forces create the demand for occupations and workers: CTE has to react to the demand. CTE must also respond and react to changes created by legislative mandates and administrative order. Due…

In this article, Gwen Taylor describes the West Kentucky Community and Technical College (WKCTC) groundbreaking program, "Accelerating Opportunity" (AO), which targeted students who are deficient in math, reading, or writing. The program uses the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges' (2013) Integrated Basic…

In the summer of 2012, the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) and the Alliance for Excellent Education conducted a survey of State Directors of Career Technical Education (CTE) to gauge state efforts to better connect CTE with a larger college- and career-readiness agenda. Survey questions…

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), ITEEA members will contribute to the development of a hybrid professional development program designed to facilitate the scale-up of an innovative underwater robotics curriculum. WaterBotics[TM] is an underwater robotics curriculum that targets students in middle and high school classrooms…

Nearly all states have standards for student learning and they have assessment programs to measure students' proficiency on those standards. But schools within each state nonetheless are left to develop their own standards-based student report cards as the primary means of communicating information about students' performance. To address the…

This updated manual was designed primarily for use by individuals with developmental disabilities and related conditions. It is hoped that it is also useful for families, as well as service coordinators and providers who directly assist families and individuals with developmental disabilities. The main focus of this manual is to provide…

Kentucky is no stranger to education reform, having worked for the better part of 20 years on raising standards to improve student achievement. In 2009, the Kentucky General Assembly called for more rigorous standards to address high school graduates' college and career readiness. So when the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief…

Twenty-seven five-year-olds walk into kindergarten on the first day of school in southeastern Kentucky. On average, nine of those children live in poverty, two were born to mothers who did not complete high school, two were removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect, and fourteen are from single-parent homes: this according to statistics…