Given dismal achievement results, Holland Elementary School in the Fresno Unified School District was determined to improve. Six years ago, in the statewide and similar school listing, the school ranked 1 and 1. Under the instructional leadership of their newly assigned principal and through their schoolwide and grade-level professional learning…

"Alabama Education News" is published monthly except for June, July, and December by the Alabama Department of Education. This publication, authorized by Section 16-2-4 of the "Code of Alabama", as recompiled in 1975, is a public service of the Alabama Department of Education designed to inform citizens and educators about…

In the study of the Technology Immersion model, high-need middle schools were "immersed" in technology by providing laptops for each teacher and student, instructional and learning resources, professional development, and technical and pedagogical support. This article reports third-year findings for the teacher component of the…

Eight teams of elementary and middle school teachers developed pilot online courses for the North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS) in the USA. A qualitative case study with focus groups and a follow-up survey helped to identify common needs of these non-traditional course designers during course development efforts. Findings suggest virtual…

This case study discusses a collaborative three year project involving two school clusters located in the North Island and South Island of New Zealand. The project was named "Project ACTIVate" and its main thrust was to study how the use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) combined with teaching, learning and research across schools. The…

The role and importance of national reform network participation in the implementation of one of the most successful U.S. whole-school reform efforts--Success for ALL (SFA)--is profiled here. The paper explores this educational network beyond professional development and examines the relationship between participation in SFA's national reform…

In an era of decreasing funding of the human services sector, it is imperative that the service sector be more effective and efficient. This study examined the outcomes of a management development intervention. Subjects (N=187) were middle managers in the helping professions. The experimental group was composed of 100 managers who voluntarily…

This paper proposes an alternative means by which to produce improvement in the quality of professional convention programs. This method is one in which concern for professional relatedness supersedes a concern for individual competition. Dialogue as the first essential element in relatedness would encourage varied perspectives on research…

Educational reforms are advocated based on rationales that emerge from the research literature. However, evaluation studies seldom examine whether the rationales used to argue for a reform actually hold up when empirical evidence is examined after the reform has been implemented. This paper examines survey data from 3 years of analyses of early…

This evaluation determined the workability of the Northeast Ohio Principals Academy Pilot Entry Year Program, noting the differential effects of its major components in developing portfolios and as a contributing factor to school improvement. The program provides leadership and support to beginning principals, provides collaborative learning…

This research report builds on the results of the CATCH project (Webb and Dekker, 2002). The CATCH project is an effort to apply and scale up previous results and design a professional development program to bring about fundamental changes in teachers' instruction to support change in teachers' formative assessment practices. In this report we…

Although Rochester, New York, is a pioneer in teacher reform, change has been painfully slow. Pockets of success are not reflected in district statistics. The 1987 reforms directed at teachers were not far-reaching enough to ensure improved test scores, given continuing problems of large class sizes, crowded schools, students' increasing poverty,…

Introduces different kinds of meta-knowledge which all have positive influence on the usage of knowledge-management systems. Presents results from a qualitative study conducted in five German companies, and derives relations between kinds of meta-knowledge and the characteristics of knowledge management systems. Only if this experience with…

To determine why so little research has been done on the effectiveness of programs designed to link instructional improvement and faculty development, this paper describes the characteristics of various programs and provides general recommendations about the necessary elements of effective faculty development programs. (SLD)

The author recommends an approach to public management studies that teaches how public management affects the quality of citizens' lives. Using examples from the literature on schools, prisons, and armies, he argues that public management studies should attempt to specify what ends given public organizations ought to achieve and how best to…