As additional funding and new legislation increase our focus on literacy, we should consider the findings of a study by the National Staff Development Council and the National Education Association on what works. The study reviews programs that have demonstrated improvements in student learning, and issues key findings for every grade level.

Responsive Teaching is an early intervention curriculum designed to address the cognitive, language, and social emotional needs of young children with developmental problems. This innovative intervention model was derived from research conducted primarily with children with Down syndrome and their mothers. Results from these studies indicated that…

The purpose of this study was to translate and validate an Arabic version of the Learning Transfer System Inventory (LTSI) for use in Jordan. The study also investigated the perceptions of transfer system characteristics across selected individual and situational variables. The LTSI was administered to 450 employees of 28 different public and…

As a multicultural teacher educator, the author has committed her professional life to helping future teachers understand their roles and responsibilities in working with the populations that Delpit (1995) referred to as "other people's children." Since the author is a former bilingual instructional assistant and English as a second language…

To refocus its professional development plan, Chaska Middle School East (Minnesota) looked at where student achievement was lagging. Using the Killion back-mapping model, a student-focused, data-driven, multi-step process by which teachers gather and study student data to determine where professional growth, development, or training is most…

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling pronunciations and previewing the spelling patterns on…

The spiritual aspect of early childhood education is supported by the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, "Te Whariki". Research in three different early childhood settings presents new perspectives on the everyday experiences of children in terms of spirituality. Each setting formed a case study that included the voices…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' use of literature-based collaborative Internet projects (CIP) in their elementary classrooms. These practices require two or more classrooms to read and analyze texts on specified topics and then share responses over the Internet. The participants, all female, represented 15 different U.S. states…

Elaborating three major dimensions of our profession, the authors argue the need for critically literate citizens and the urgent need for English teacher educators to prepare teachers who envision that as their key professional responsibility. The authors contextualize this task within the current political and social climate in which distortion…

Despite the rich literature on disciplinary knowledge construction and multilingual scholars' academic literacy practices, little is known about how novice scholars are engaged in knowledge construction in negotiation with various target discourse communities. In this case study, with a focused analysis of a Chinese computer science doctoral…

In this case study, I have examined teachers' use of co-teaching models to support students with learning disabilities in an inclusive elementary classroom. Co-teachers progressed from the developmental stage of collegial growth to the compromising stage (Gately & Gately, 2001), but struggled to achieve the third stage of collaboration. Teachers…

Within this book Leadership for Social Justice: Promoting Equity and Excellence Through Inquiry and Reflective Practice the contributors provide a variety of rich perspectives to the social justice phenomenon from the lens of empirical, historical, narrative, and conceptual designs. These designs reiterate the importance of bridging theory and…

This report is one of nine detailed case studies of small urban high schools that served as the foundation for the Education Resource Strategies (ERS) report "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools." These nine schools were dubbed "Leading Edge Schools" because they stand apart from other high…

Facing mounting evidence that California has fallen behind on many key indicators of educational performance, policymakers and the public share considerable interest in exploring whether California should expand public funding for preschool education. This expanded funding will be most effective if resources can be directed to their most efficient…

This year the Center on Education Policy (CEP) analyzed data on the achievement of different groups of students in two distinct ways. First, it looked at grade 4 test results to determine whether the performance of various groups improved at three achievement levels--basic and above, proficient and above, and advanced. Second, it looked at gaps…