A rural district designed a unique program for gifted elementary students which allowed any teacher the opportunity to develop and teach a qualitatively different unit to students identified as gifted. The half-day once-a-week pull-out program encouraged teachers to be part of the selection process and employed a coordinator to monitor the…

A Language Fluency Project was set up to encourage eight culturally disadvantaged and mentally handicapped girls (11 to 13 years old) to verbalize more clearly and more fluently and to maintain a verbal interaction. The program consisted of having the group imagine that they were taking part in a television documentary program. Over a 20-week…

Two elementary schools in White Plains, New York, have been involved in the Child Development Project (CDP) since 1991. This paper describes how the staffs and administrators built caring communities into their schools. The paper is written from the perspective of a staff developer who became a district coordinator for staff development. The paper…

Discussing the "Whole Language and More '93" meeting, this paper presents a series of helpful how-to's (and some valuable caveats) for those involved in conference planning. The first part of the paper presents a discussion of 10 steps the conference organizer would take again, including: promoting the conference; organizing various…

A program designed to serve culturally different gifted elementary students in the Omaha (Nebraska) Public Schools is described. Following a brief rationale, information on the program's identification procedures lists 12 typical characteristics of culturally diverse gifted students. Possible program approaches are delineated, including (1)…

A description is given of a staff development program designed to bridge the gap between regular teachers and teachers of gifted children. The program is based on the following concepts: (1) teachers must be provided with practical ideas that can be put into place immediately in the classroom; (2) teachers must feel ownership of their own…

Project IMPACT, a joint effort by public and private schools in Grand Forks (ND) to provide services to gifted elementary students, is described. Four project objectives are identified: to combine educational resources of public and private schools; to provide workshops and resources for teachers; to identify teachers suitable for teaching…

A report is given of a three-phase study of the performance of 554 elementary education majors before and after a recent wave of educational reforms in Mississippi. Data were arranged pre/post Mississippi Education Reform Act (1982), pre/post College of Education reform (1984-88), and post reform data (after 1988). The purpose was to be able to…

The Special Education Department of the Omaha Public Schools implemented assessment classes for students identified as learning disabled. The classes offer the opportunity for in-depth evaluation of behavior in a variety of situations and with many different techniques and materials. Four critical elements of LD assessment classes include: the…

This study investigated what new Korean elementary teachers wanted to learn and what experienced teachers, regarded as potential mentors, expected to teach to beginning teachers. The study was conducted to help determine the contents of a mentoring program being developed for new elementary teachers by using needs assessment. Separate…

Combining goals from Teacher Corps and Individually Guided Education Programs, this paper presents seven mutually exclusive goals for teachers of middle school reading programs. They are: teachers will learn to conduct a needs assessment; teachers will involve parents and the community; teachers will use multicultural considerations in the reading…

When a program for gifted children in Massillon, Ohio, was being developed, the planning team built into the program proposal a provision for staff development for classroom teachers. The goal of this training of third through sixth grade classroom teachers was to facilitate the bridging experience for the identified gifted students and to provide…

A federally funded project investigated a computer networking system in special education being implemented in Johnson County, Wyoming. The goals of the networking system project were: (1) to demonstrate a computer networking system as it applies to an educational setting; and (2) to conduct a research project to study the effects of computer…

The paper describes the evolution of the Learning Games Libraries (LGLs), a collaborative approach between special education and public library staff to offer developmental learning materials to young handicapped children and their parents. LGLs began in the United States in 1935 and have spread to at least 23 countries, offering services to both…

This paper explores problems of construct validity in the evaluation of the Follow Through Planned Variation program. Comments center around political ramifications of the program evaluation design, insufficient knowledge on the part of program planners, the diversity of the experimental options, and the instability of the sample. It is suggested…