In his 1837 essay "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a challenge that is appropriate for honors practitioners today--namely, to figure out just how good a time this is to be doing the work we do. Honors students, faculty, and staff occupy every part of the institutions we call home, so we should take advantage of our…

Educational reforms have occurred throughout the history of public education. In 2009, the federal Race to the Top initiative was born and included many educational reform models. To have these reform models gain traction at the state level, a call was made by the U.S. Department of Education (Race to the Top Program Executive Summary, 2009) for…

Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par…

Since the emergence of middle schools as distinct educational settings in the 1960s, proponents of the model have advocated for structures and approaches that best meet the particular developmental needs of young adolescents. Middle school researchers have developed frameworks of best practices for schools that have been widely, if not uniformly,…

In this study, the researchers highlight differences in district level value-added growth data of gifted students in urban and suburban districts, as categorized by the Ohio Department of Education. In addition to analyzing the difference between the academic growth of urban and suburban gifted students, the researchers sought to synthesize…

Do you find it challenging to have discussions with instructors about designing online courses and best practices in teaching? This article will highlight key components to conducting effective Learning Design meetings. It outlines techniques used by this institution that inspires faculty to design coherent courses that lead to meaningful learning…

Early childhood education programs play an important role in child family-to-school transition. In 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10, the California Children and Families Act, which levied a 50-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes and other tobacco products to finance programs for children ages 0-5. In less than two decades, First 5…

This paper contributes towards a framework for analysing the effect of teaching Economics through a foreign language, in order to discover best practices that foster key content and language skills for Higher Education institutions following language bilingual programmes. The first part of the paper deals with the benefits and problems of…

Through extensive research, the Foundation has identified the most critical levers for success in the classroom -- high standards, high-quality feedback, and effective tools -- and worked with teachers to develop, test, and strengthen them. This report describes what we know about these factors, why they are important, and what we need to learn,…

Education reform initiatives tend to promise higher effectiveness in classrooms especially when emphasis is given to e-learning and digital resources. Practical changes in classroom realities or school organization, however, are lacking. A major European initiative entitled Open Discovery Space (ODS) examined the challenge of modernizing school…

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…

There are ongoing debates as to the merits of mastery and performance (or competitive) approaches to school and student learning. Mastery approaches are focused on factors and processes such as effort, skill development, learning, and understanding. Performance approaches are focused more on competition, demonstrating relative ability, social…

Effective teaching has long been an issue of national concern, but in recent years focus on the effectiveness of programs to produce high-quality teachers has sharpened. Long-standing achievement gaps persist despite large-scale legislative changes at the federal and state levels, and American students continue to show poorer performance on…

What is effective teaching? It is not enough to say "I know it when I see it"--not when we are expecting so much more from students and teachers than in the past. To help teachers achieve greater success with their students we need new and better ways to identify and develop effective teaching. The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET)…