A key thrust of education reform is the spread of innovative ideas and practices oriented toward school improvement and advancements in student's deep learning and teacher's professional development. Framed within concepts of scaling and diffusion, trajectories of innovation spread can afford explanatory and predictive understandings of adoption…

Work-based learning provides a continuum of activities--from career exploration and job shadowing to internships and apprenticeships--that help students develop technical and professional skills in an authentic work environment. While many work-based learning programs are designed and operated at the local level, several states have begun building…

In too many districts, evaluation of teachers ensures competence but does little or nothing to encourage and support expertise. In this thought-provoking and groundbreaking book, Tony Frontier and Paul Mielke address this issue head-on, combining the conceptual and the practical by offering a compelling vision of teacher growth, along with nearly…

This study investigated whether the use of sticky notes as a flagging reading comprehension intervention strategy would significantly improve reading growth as shown in informational text objective quizzes for sixth grade Academic Intervention Service (AIS) students. The intervention was administered as a guided reading, teacher-directed method…

"We were a high-performing school. Now we're not." These words--spoken in 2015 by the head of a respected network of "no excuses" charter schools--could have come from any number of school leaders across the country, as they adjusted to the "skyrocketing" demands of new college- and career-ready (CCR) standards. The…

Since the creation of Pathways to Results (PTR) in 2009, Illinois Central College (ICC) has participated in all but one year, working to improve outcomes across a number of different pathways. ICC has been innovative in its use of PTR over the years, and the 2014/2015 PTR project was no different. The ICC team worked to identify parallels between…

Oakton Community College (Oakton) launched a Pathways to Results (PTR) project for the first time in 2014, a decision that converged with the launch of an all-college student success team with the goal of making evidence-based decisions to significantly improve student success. Oakton chose to work initially on its manufacturing program.…

Video compression and communication has been an important field over the past decades and critical for many applications, e.g., video on demand, video-conferencing, and remote education. In many applications, providing low-delay and error-resilient video transmission and increasing the coding efficiency are two major challenges. Low-delay and…

Project success has multiple definitions in the scholarly literature. Research has shown that some scholars and practitioners define project success as the completion of a project within schedule and within budget. Others consider a successful project as one in which the customer is satisfied with the product. This quantitative study was conducted…

Nationwide, the prevalence of new educator evaluation systems has increased since the inception of federal initiatives such as the Race to the Top grant competition. Yet limited empirical research examines teacher demographic characteristics and their relationship to teacher evaluation outcomes, such as teacher evaluation ratings. Previous…

This chapter describes how Inspectorates of Education operationalize different inspection goals (control, improvement, and liaison) in their inspection indicator frameworks. The chapter provides an overview and examples of the indicators used across a number of countries and how these are incorporated in inspection frameworks to evaluate and…

The brief Student-Teacher Classroom Interaction Observation (ST-CIO) is a direct observation assessment that evaluates interactions between teachers and students. The measure was developed for use in classrooms during academic instruction to determine the frequency of teacher use of reprimands and praise toward a student, as well as the frequency…

Over the past five years, policymakers have shown a renewed interest in using teacher evaluation as a lever for increasing the quality of the teacher labor market. As such, states have been spurred by federal policies such as Race to the Top and influential foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to use a more reliable, more…

The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is required by RCW 28A.300.830 to report every three years on funding, services, and educational outcomes for students served under Washington's ESSA Consolidated Plan (the Plan), Title I, Part D. This report covers schools and programs receiving Title I, Part D grants, including…

The advent of faculty development centers that focus on the improvement of teaching skills and better understanding of student learning concepts dates back to the 1960s. These centers were initiated from a realization that the effectiveness of a faculty member resulted from growth and maturity over time and that certain support systems were…