How do school leaders help students and parents, especially those from low-income families, understand the value of a college education? Engaging students and families early and often and using a continuum of strategies enables school leaders to close aspiration gaps, thus creating and sustaining a college-going culture for all students.…

This article is a follow-up to "Focus first on outcomes" (Bradley, Munger, & Hord, 2015), published in the August 2015 issue of "JSD" ["Journal of Staff Development"]. That article set the stage by creating awareness of the need and purpose for thinking first about outcomes, not activities, when starting a change…

No longer is the central office a place for educators' careers to meet a dead end. Nor can it be where ineffective leaders are transferred to lessen impact. It cannot be "the blob," as coined by William Bennett (Walker, 1987). The Wallace Foundation notes that the central office has never been more important for system and individual…

Survey research is prevalent among many professional fields. Both cost effective and time efficient, this method of research is commonly used for the purposes of gaining insight into the attitudes, thoughts, and opinions of populations. Additionally, because there are several types of survey research designs and data collection instruments, the…

As managers of special collections engage with evolving formats and technologies, it is imperative that these professionals remain well versed in papyrus, paper, and principles that inform archival work. The permanence of this content defines our past, informs our present, and shapes our future. However, a constricting interpretation of archival…

This chapter focuses on the use of coaching for adult learners, the specific characteristics adults bring to the learning environment, and strategies for dealing with the obstacles adult learners may face.

Many community colleges are unwelcoming to LGBTQ students and this chapter provides practical suggestions to community college leaders to develop a more inclusive campus culture.

Plagiarism is a folk devil into which is poured many of the challenges, problems and difficulties confronting higher education. This article investigates how software--Turnitin in particular--is "solving" a particular "crisis" in universities. However, I investigate how alternative strategies for the development of information…

This article advocates a radicalized theoretical construction of community service learning. To accomplish this radicalization, I initially take up a discussion of traditional understandings of CSL rooted in pragmatic/progressive thought. I then suggest that this traditional structural foundation can be radicalized by incorporating Deborah…

In this response to Molly Ware's review of our 2013 book, "John Dewey and Education Outdoors," we extend her suggestion that complexity be regarded as an important, generative force in education reform. Drawing on Dewey's 1933 "Utopian Schools" speech, we discuss the "level deeper" that Dewey sought as he…

In this article, Ellen Scully-Russ responds to St. Clair's analysis (EJ1072357) of the recent policy report from the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, "Making Skills Everyone's Business: A Call to Transform Adult Learning in the United States" (MSEB) (United States Department of Education [USDoE], 2015). While Scully-Russ…

Teachers often start a new school year working extremely hard to reteach last year's content, particularly for their lower income students. According to "Making Summer Count," a report commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and written by researchers at Rand, rigorous studies of voluntary summer programs, mandatory summer programs, and…

In most cultures, play seems to matter a great deal to young children. This is evidenced by the vast amount of time children spent playing and the combination of often unsurpassed passion, imagination, and energy which they invest in this activity. This paper explores why play matters through the lens of Bakhtin's dialogic approach combined with…

It seems that instructors and professors--from community college to the Ivy League--are concerned by the lack of work completion in their courses, and therefore by student level of preparedness for class, or indeed, college. Work completion is typically a very large portion of course expectations-- often beginning on day one--and it is generally…

This study examines the role of implicit theories of change in inhibiting STEM reform and identifies a range of approaches to help change agents alter their implicit beliefs in order to develop more explicit theories of change. Through observations and interviews, we focus on the experience of reform teams on 11 campuses that were involved in a…