Florida's Broward County Public Schools and the University of Chicago engaged in a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) to scale teacher practices that support students' critical thinking. As part of the RPP, Jeanne Century's research team conducted research to determine what barriers might limit the spread of these practices. The findings show…

Acceleration of courses has been documented to achieve an extended academic calendar, financial benefits to universities, time savings for professors, and provide more flexibility for students. The purpose of this study was to examine preservice teachers' learning experiences while enrolled in two accelerated teacher preparation courses. Results…

The study addressed the gap in fifth-grade science proficiency between English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in two different science programs in a large school district in the Southeast United States. The Inspire program was implemented in 125 schools, while a combination of Inspire and Promoting Science among English Language Learners…

Pioneer Valley Books (PVB) contracted McREL International to investigate the effects of the third grade Literacy Footprints (LFP) guided reading system on English language arts (ELA) performance on state assessments. LFP is a research-based, comprehensive, small-group literacy tool that facilitates explicit and systematic guided reading…

School gardens programs and garden-based education are positioned to become fixtures in educational institutions given recent trends and the national interest in gardens at school sites. Agricultural education professionals have integrated school gardens into core science, social studies, math, and language arts courses as well as agricultural…

Billions of dollars are spent every year on teacher professional development (PD) programs (Fermanich, 2002; Odden et al., 2002; TNTP, 2015; U.S. Department of Education, 2014). The few rigorous evaluations of PD programs that have been done usually report a null effect on student achievement, leading many scholars to conclude that teacher PD…

In recent decades, in line with improvements in technology, schools have increasingly opted for Online Credit Recovery Programs (OCRPs) over traditional face-to-face courses. Despite sharing a common goal with traditional face-to-face programs--providing a pathway for students to get back on track, to avoid failing additional courses and falling…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers concerned about college under-enrollment among underserved groups of students have traditionally focused reform efforts at the high school level. Over the last several decades, however, there has been a growing interest in improving college readiness beginning at the elementary level. Recently, the…

Decades of research have emphasized the need for engaging, accessible ways to help students learn fundamental mathematical concepts. Research also shows that teacher beliefs about teaching and learning have an outsized influence on the quality and effectiveness of curricular interventions. This article reports results of an independent evaluation…

The Wallace Foundation's Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative (PSELI) is a six-year initiative that The Wallace Foundation launched in 2017 to explore whether and how children benefit when schools and their out-of-school-time programs partner to improve social and emotional learning (SEL), as well as what it takes to do this…

The demographic profile of the United States has been rapidly changing; by 2020, minority students will constitute the majority of the public school student population nationwide. This makes cultural competence a necessity for today's school leaders. Educational leadership preparation programs are responsible for preparing culturally competent…

In the United States today, more jobs than ever before require at least some postsecondary education. Yet too many young adults are either not enrolling or not succeeding in college. This scenario exists across many different types of communities, but schools in rural areas, particularly those with large populations of low-income students, face…

This white paper presents a selection of model schools who all have, to some degree, fostered deeper learning. Schools were selected by internet search, or through references in "deeper learning" reports and documents. It should be noted that information in these reviews is based on information from school web-sites, in some cases the…

Theatre instructional techniques, including reader's theatre and process drama teaching strategies, have been employed as instructional strategies in classrooms to enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary learning in students. In this era of increasing accountability for educational outcomes, quantifying what, if any, impact such instructional…

This educational white paper is being written in the wake of school closures resulting from the CoVid-19 pandemic. As the necessity for distance learning has become apparent in order to reduce the spread of CoVid-19, the burden of the education of school children has shifted from teachers to parents. In this white paper, the author examines the…